Knowledge base
Product feed attributes
A product feed attribute is one named field in a feed row, such as gtin or item_group_id, with its own format rules and its own requirement level on each sales channel. This index lists every attribute documented here, what it does, and where its value comes from in a Shopify store.
| Attribute | Name | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| availability | Stock availability | The availability attribute tells a channel whether an item can be bought right now, using a fixed vocabulary rather than a stock count. On Shopify it cannot be read from inventory quantity alone, because a variant that does not track inventory or that allows overselling is purchasable at zero quantity. |
| brand | Brand name | The brand attribute is the name of the brand a product belongs to, and it is what makes a manufacturer part number meaningful and a listing eligible for brand-based matching. On Shopify it maps most often from the vendor field, which is unreliable because merchants commonly use vendor to record a supplier or distributor rather than the consumer-facing brand. |
| condition | Product condition | The condition attribute declares whether an item is new, refurbished or used. Its requirement level is one of the sharpest differences between channels: Google only needs it when an item is not new, while Meta expects it on every item, so a feed built for one and pointed at the other fails on every row. |
| custom_label_0 | Custom label | The custom_label attributes are five free-text fields, numbered 0 to 4, that carry your own segmentation into a feed so campaigns can bid on groupings the channel knows nothing about. Nothing is shown to shoppers: their entire purpose is to let you subdivide a catalogue by margin, season, stock age, bestseller status or anything else you can compute. |
| description | Product description | The description attribute is the prose a channel uses to understand and display what a product is. On Shopify it maps from body_html, which is rich text, so it needs its HTML stripped and its entities decoded before it can be submitted. |
| google_product_category | Google product category | The google_product_category attribute places an item in Google's own fixed product taxonomy, a tree of several thousand predefined categories. Google infers a category when the attribute is omitted, but the inference is often wrong for specialist catalogues, and certain categories such as alcohol and subscription hardware require it explicitly. |
| gtin | Global Trade Item Number | The gtin attribute is the globally unique barcode number a manufacturer assigns to a product, covering UPC, EAN, JAN and ISBN formats. Channels use it to match an item against the same product sold elsewhere, and on Shopify it comes from the variant's barcode field, which is optional in the admin and therefore frequently empty. |
| id | Product ID | The id attribute is the unique, permanent identifier a sales channel uses to recognise one item across every feed update. In a Shopify feed it must identify a single variant rather than a product, and once a channel has seen an id it should never be reused for a different item. |
| identifier_exists | Identifier exists declaration | The identifier_exists attribute is an explicit declaration that a product has no manufacturer-assigned identifiers, set to no when a GTIN, MPN and brand genuinely do not exist for the item. It is a statement about the product, not a way to silence identifier warnings, and channels treat misuse as a data quality problem rather than a resolution. |
| image_link | Main product image URL | The image_link attribute is the URL of the single main image a channel shows for an item. On Shopify the correct source is the variant's own image where one is assigned, falling back to the product's featured image, because a feed that shows the wrong colour is worse than one that shows a generic shot. |
| item_group_id | Item group ID | The item_group_id attribute groups the rows that are variants of the same product, so a channel can show one listing with a size or colour picker instead of several unrelated listings. On Shopify the natural source is the product ID, shared by every variant row generated from that product. |
| link | Product landing page URL | The link attribute is the URL a shopper is sent to after clicking a listing, and the page the channel crawls to verify that the feed is telling the truth about price and availability. On a multi-market Shopify store it must point at the market-specific storefront URL, not the primary domain. |
| mpn | Manufacturer Part Number | The mpn attribute is the part number a manufacturer uses to identify a product in its own catalogue, and it serves as the fallback identifier when an item has no GTIN. Unlike a GTIN it is only unique within one manufacturer, so it is meaningless to a channel unless the brand attribute is supplied alongside it. |
| price | Product price | The price attribute is the item's full price before any discount, submitted as a number followed by an ISO 4217 currency code. It must match what a shopper sees on the landing page in that market, including whether tax is included, which is why multi-market Shopify stores so often trip the price mismatch disapproval. |
| sale_price | Sale price | The sale_price attribute is the temporarily reduced price of an item, submitted alongside the full price so a channel can show the reduction rather than simply a lower number. On Shopify the reliable source is the variant's compare-at price relationship, and discounts applied by code or automatic rule are not visible in the product record at all. |
| title | Product title | The title attribute is the product name a channel shows in a listing and matches against search queries, which makes it the single highest-leverage field in a product feed. On Shopify it usually needs building from the product title plus the variant's options, because the raw product title alone does not describe an individual variant. |
Frequently asked questions
Which product feed attributes are required?
Every channel requires id, title, description, link, image_link, availability and price. Beyond that it varies: brand and a product identifier are required for most products, condition is required on every Meta item but only for non-new items on Google, and item_group_id is required wherever a product has variants.
Do all channels use the same attribute names?
Mostly, because Microsoft, Meta and Pinterest all borrowed heavily from Google's specification. Where a channel differs, each attribute page lists the name it uses in the support table.