Use the removal delay feature to protect your products - Google Merchant Center Help [gg-merchants-en]

Use the removal delay feature to protect your products

To prevent the unintentional removal of products from your feed, turn on the removal delay feature within the product protection settings. This feature protects against data removal that may result from the addition of incomplete product data. It also lets you receive notifications when your products are detected to be at risk of removal.

How it works

The product protection feature is triggered by a significant drop in the number of products in a particular feed. To prevent the accidental deletion of product data, Google won't remove the products that were missing in your feed from your account. If no action is taken, these missing products will remain active until their previous expiration date.

You'll receive a notification of this protection by email, as long as you've opted to get email updates for feed notifications, including product data alerts. An alert will also appear in the "Processing" tab on the "Feeds" page indicating that the product protection has been triggered. The alert also indicates the number of products detected in the previous uploads.

If you didn't intend to delete protected products from your feed, check the product data that was added most recently for any errors, make any necessary corrections, and add the product data again. Google will accept the updated feed, and will permanently remove all products from the feed that weren't included in the updated product data following their expiration date. Any time a product is added via feed, it has a default expiration of 30 days. That expiration date is extended whenever the product is submitted again, but is never more than 30 days. Google won't remove protected products until after their expiration dates (up to 30 days).

If you did intend to remove protected products from your feed, you can override the feature in the following ways:

1. In the warning found on your feeds processing page, click Remove products.
2. Disable the feature in your account settings and then add your product data.
3. Manually add the product data.

Any of the options mentioned above will allow you to safely proceed with the deletion of products from your account.

Eligible feeds

The product protection feature is available for primary feeds, including product, local product, local product inventory feeds, and any file feed upload (including spreadsheets). This feature isn't available for supplemental feeds, API, Automated Feeds, online product inventory updates, or local product inventory updates.

The feature is turned off by default, but you can turn it on or adjust the percentage drop threshold in your account settings.

Instructions

How to adjust the product protection feature

1. Sign in to your Merchant Center account.
2. Click on the tools icon .
3. Click Account settings.
4. Click the Product protection menu and toggle "Start protection when this percentage of products would be removed".
5. Set the percentage drop threshold that will trigger protection of your products.
6. Click Save.