Black Friday falls on November 27, 2026, and Cyber Monday on November 30. If your products are disapproved that week, they don’t show on Google Shopping or in free listings, and there is no time to wait for a review. The work in Google Merchant Center has to be done before November.
This checklist covers what to review, in what order, and how to tell a healthy catalog from one that is about to break. If you would rather have someone else run it, a Google Merchant Center agency can do the audit for you; everything below is also something an in-house team can do.
Why do you need to start in October?
Because every change you send to Google Merchant Center goes through a review, and during peak season more stores are changing prices and promotions at the same time. Most products are approved quickly, but a product disapproved on November 26 can miss the whole weekend.
There is also a human reason. Fixing a feed in October is a quiet job. Fixing it on Black Friday morning means developers, marketers and the person who owns the feed all trying to change the same files at once.
What is the checklist?
1. Clear every current issue
Open the product issues in Merchant Center and fix everything that is disapproved or limited today: missing identifiers, image problems, price or availability mismatches. Starting the season with a clean account is the single most important step.
Work from the biggest group down. One cause, such as a missing identifier on a whole brand, often explains hundreds of rows. Fix the cause in the source data, not row by row in the feed.
2. Schedule sale prices in the feed
Use the sale_price attribute together with sale_price_effective_date, so discounts start and end on their own. The price on your product page must match the price in the feed at every moment, or Google will flag a price mismatch.
3. Submit promotions early
Merchant Center promotions, such as a percentage off or free shipping, are reviewed before they show. Create them well before Black Friday, with the exact dates and conditions your store will apply.
4. Keep stock and availability accurate
Increase how often the feed updates during the sale. When a product sells out, mark it as out of stock instead of deleting it from the feed, so it keeps its history and comes back cleanly.
5. Update shipping times
Carriers slow down in late November and December. Review handling time, transit time and order cutoff times in your Merchant Center shipping settings so the delivery dates Google shows are ones you can meet.
6. Keep promotional text out of titles and images
Google doesn’t allow promotional text such as «Black Friday deal» or «free shipping» in product titles, or promotional overlays on images. Use the sale price and promotions for that, and keep titles descriptive.
7. Label your best sellers
Add custom labels for best sellers, high-margin products and products with deep discounts. Your Google Ads campaigns can then put more budget behind the products that matter most that week.
8. Check your return policy and business details
Make sure your return policy, contact details and shipping costs are configured in Merchant Center and match what your website says. Mismatches here are a common cause of account warnings.
9. Freeze big changes
Avoid changing your ecommerce platform, theme, URLs or product IDs between now and January. Any of those can disapprove products in bulk right when you can least afford it.
What does the calendar look like?
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Now to October 31 | Fix all current issues, label best sellers, freeze big changes. |
| November 1 to 15 | Load sale prices with effective dates, create promotions, update shipping times. |
| November 16 to 25 | Final review of the feed, promotions and product pages. |
| November 26 to 30 | Check product issues every day and fix anything that gets disapproved. |
| December | Adjust shipping cutoffs for Christmas delivery. |
How do you run a pre-season feed audit step by step?
Run it in this order, because each step depends on the one before. The whole sequence is a few days of work for a small catalog and longer for a large one.
- Export the diagnostics. Download the current list of product issues and sort it by number of affected products, not by severity label.
- Trace each top issue to its source. Decide whether the cause sits in the platform, a plugin, the supplier data or a feed rule. Fix it there.
- Compare feed and page for a sample. Take 30 to 50 products across price bands and categories. Check price, availability, title and image on the product page against the feed row.
- Check identifiers. Confirm that brand and GTIN are present where they exist, and that products without a GTIN are marked correctly instead of carrying invented values.
- Build the sale layer. List which products are discounted, by how much and for which dates. Load the sale prices with effective dates and build the matching promotions.
- Label the products that matter. Apply custom labels for best sellers, margin tiers and discounted items, so the people running campaigns do not have to ask for a new feed in the middle of the sale.
- Test the refresh. Change a price and a stock level on one test product and measure how long the change takes to appear in Merchant Center.
- Write the daily watch routine. Decide who looks at product issues from November 26 to 30, at what time, and who can change the data.
What should you check, and what does good look like?
| What to check | Why it matters | What good looks like | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price on page vs. feed | Price mismatches disapprove products | Same price at every moment, including when a sale starts and ends | Sale starts on the site at midnight but the feed updates hours later |
| Availability | Shoppers who land on a sold-out product leave | Stock changes reach the feed within the sale-day refresh window you tested | Weekly feed fetch left unchanged during the sale |
| Titles | Titles are what shoppers read on Google | Brand, product type and key attributes, no sale wording | «Black Friday» added to hundreds of titles by a plugin |
| Promotions | They are reviewed before they show | Created early, with the exact dates and conditions of the offer | Created the night before, then waiting for review |
| Shipping times | Google shows delivery estimates to shoppers | Handling, transit and cutoff reflect real carrier performance in peak weeks | Normal-season transit times left in place |
| Product IDs | Changing an ID means a new product with no history | Stable IDs through the whole season | A migration or app change rewrites IDs in November |
Which mistakes are the most common, and how do you spot them?
Most peak-season problems leave a visible trace in the diagnostics before they become sales problems. These are the ones to look for.
- A sudden jump in price-mismatch issues. Usually a sale price on the page that the feed does not yet carry, or a caching layer showing old prices. Compare a handful of affected products on the page and in the feed.
- A group of products disappearing at once. Often a theme, plugin or URL change. Check what was deployed the day before.
- Products that vanish and return as new. Someone deleted and re-added products instead of marking them out of stock. They lose their history and go through review again.
- Promotions that never show. Check whether they were submitted late, whether the dates are wrong or whether the products are not eligible.
- Delivery promises you cannot keep. Compare the shipping times in Merchant Center with what your warehouse and carriers really deliver in peak weeks.
What does this look like in a hypothetical store?
This example is illustrative, not a real client. Imagine a store with a few thousand SKUs and a sale on about a fifth of them. The team opens the diagnostics in mid-October and finds that one brand accounts for most of the disapprovals, because its supplier file has no GTINs.
Instead of editing rows, they fix the brand’s identifiers at the source and add a rule for products that truly have none. Then they list the discounted products, load sale prices with effective dates for November 27 to 30, and create the matching promotion on November 3.
On November 20 they change one test price and watch it reach Merchant Center. The refresh turns out slower than the sale needs, so they increase the update frequency before the weekend. From November 26 one named person checks product issues each morning and each afternoon.
Nothing in that story is clever. It is the same checklist, run early and in order, with one owner.
What should you ask your team or agency before starting?
- Who owns the feed from November 26 to 30, and who can change product data on those days?
- How long does a price change take to reach Merchant Center today? Has anyone measured it?
- Which apps, plugins or feed rules change titles, prices or IDs automatically?
- Is any platform, theme or URL change planned before January?
- Which products will be discounted, and who confirms the final list?
When does this checklist not apply to you?
If you do not sell through Google Shopping or free listings, most of this does not apply. If your sale is a single sitewide discount code that does not change product prices, the sale-price steps are not needed, though the issue cleanup, shipping times and the change freeze still are. And if your catalog is a few dozen products with no issues, the audit takes an afternoon.
How does Avafa work on this?
Avafa is a consultancy based in Spain that works remotely with ecommerce teams in English and Spanish. Our Google Merchant Center agency service starts with an account and feed audit like the one above, fixes the data at the source and sets up monitoring. We work on product data and feed quality; we do not manage ad spend.
For the wider picture, see what a Google Merchant Center agency does, how one product feed can serve every AI channel, what product data AI shopping agents read and our agentic commerce readiness checklist. Good product data also supports your ecommerce SEO.
If something goes wrong during the sale
If products get disapproved during the sale, fix the data first and then let Google review it again; don’t delete and re-upload products. Correct the cause, not only the symptom, or the same products will be flagged again.
FAQs
When are Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2026?
Black Friday is Friday, November 27, 2026, and Cyber Monday is Monday, November 30, 2026.
Can I write «Black Friday» in my product titles?
No. Promotional text in titles goes against Google’s product data requirements and can get products disapproved. Use sale prices and promotions instead.
Should I remove products that sell out?
No. Mark them as out of stock in the feed. Removing and adding products again makes them go through review from scratch.
Who should own the feed during the sale?
One named person, with the access to change product data and a backup. Splitting ownership between marketing and development is how issues sit unfixed for a day.
Do I need sale_price_effective_date if I change prices manually?
It is the safer option. It lets the discount start and end on schedule, so you are not editing the feed at midnight on a holiday weekend.
Is the Merchant API relevant to this checklist?
Only if your feed tool sends data through the API. The Merchant API replaced the Content API for Shopping, which was shut down on August 18, 2026, so confirm your tool has been moved over.
