2026-10-18

WooCommerce products not syncing to Google Merchant Center: a checklist in the right order

"Not synced", "Pending" for days, or Merchant Center showing fewer products than your store: these are the most common complaints about Google for WooCommerce. Recent threads in its public support forum describe the same symptom with different causes underneath.

Most guides jump straight to product data: GTINs, prices, images. That's the last place to look. If the plugin can't send anything at all, perfect product data won't help. Check these six places in order, and stop at the first one that fails.

1. Did setup actually finish?

In Marketing → Google for WooCommerce, go through every onboarding step until the plugin stops asking: Google account, Merchant Center account, target audience, shipping, and the free-listings choice. A store can look connected while one step is unfinished. When the plugin offers to create a new Merchant Center account and you already have one, choose your existing account. Two accounts for one website cause their own problems.

2. Has the Merchant Center account accepted Google's terms?

Sign in at merchants.google.com as the account owner. If there's a banner or prompt about terms, accept it. Unsigned terms make the plugin's background jobs fail with "Terms of Service is not signed" while every screen in WordPress looks fine. We wrote about that trap and the cached check that follows it.

3. Is the job queue running?

Go to WooCommerce → Status → Scheduled Actions, search for gla and open Pending. Note the oldest date, wait ten minutes and refresh.

• The count drops: the queue is working. Give it time, especially for stores with many products or variations.
• Nothing moves, and the dates are days or months old: the queue is stalled. On small sites WordPress cron only runs when someone visits, and some hosts disable it. Ask your host to run WordPress cron from a real server cron job. A queue with thousands of old failed or pending actions can also slow the database enough to stall everything. Clear the backlog first.

4. What do the failed jobs say?

Same screen, Failed tab. Open the newest gla jobs and read the log message. It's the most useful line in the whole plugin:

5. Is an old answer cached?

The plugin remembers some checks for hours. We saw a failed "store URL matches Merchant Center" check block syncing for about 12 hours after the real problem was fixed. If everything above is fixed and nothing syncs, wait out a cached check before changing anything else. Then start a full sync from the plugin's connection test page: admin.php?page=connection-test-admin-page → "Sync All Products with Google Merchant Center".

6. Only now: the product data

When the plugin is sending products and some still fail, open each one's issue in the plugin's product feed page or in Merchant Center:

• Price or availability mismatch: the feed, the page and the page's structured data must agree, including sale prices and currency.
• Missing identifier: use the product's real GTIN. For genuinely own-brand or handmade products without one, set that no identifier exists. Never invent a GTIN.
• Variable products: every variation is its own item. Each needs its own price, stock status and attributes. A variation without a price won't sync.
• Images: one clear product photo, with no watermarks or promotional text.

Two things that look like sync problems but aren't

• Merchant Center shows products the plugin didn't send. Google can find products by crawling your site. Once the plugin's feed is complete, turn off that automatic source in Merchant Center's data sources.
• Products synced, but none appear on Google. If your account has an account-level issue (for example "Misrepresentation"), no products show until it's resolved and reviewed. That's a different job: identity, policies, claims and shipping.

If you'd rather not work through this alone, our Google Merchant Center page has a $29 written diagnosis and fixed-price fixes, and our free Merchant Center Check shows the top issues on your store in seconds. The do-it-yourself version, with templates and appeal text, is our recovery guide: the Kindle ebook ($6.99), or the workbook edition on that page.