Fix “Missing product description” in Google Merchant Center

Short answer. Merchant Center reports “Missing product description” (shown as “Missing value [description]” in the issue list) when the description attribute is empty; the attribute is required for each product. Write a description of the product in your store, around 500 to 1,000 characters, without prices, shipping or promotional text.

What Merchant Center means by “Missing value [description]”

The description specification marks the attribute as required for each product, 1 to 5,000 characters, and says products without one receive a warning and may experience limited performance. Google’s help page for the issue titles it “Missing product description”, explains it as a description omitted or forgotten when the product was added, and recommends around 500 to 1,000 characters. In the issue list it appears as “Missing value [description]”.

The description does two jobs. Google matches shoppers’ searches against it, so an empty description is a product that can only be found by its title. And Google compares it with the product page, so the text has to be the product’s real text, not filler written for the feed.

Why it happens

• Never written. Products added quickly with a title, a price and a photo; the description field left for later.
• Variants without their own description in an export that reads the variant only, not the parent.
• Description lives in a custom field (a tab, a metafield, a specifications block) that the export does not map.
• HTML-only content (an image, an embedded video) that becomes empty once tags are stripped.

How to fix it

In Shopify

Write the description in the product’s Description editor; variants inherit it. Shopify’s channel and our integration send the product description, HTML stripped, for every variant row. If your content is in metafields, either move a summary into the description or map the metafield in your feed tool. Aim for two or three sentences on material, dimensions, fit or use, without price or shipping claims.

In WooCommerce

WooCommerce has a long description and a short description; variations can carry their own. Our free connector uses the variation’s description when set, then the product’s short description, then the long one, so filling any of the three clears the issue. Filter Products by an empty description with a quick export, or use the Needs attention CSV to find the ids.

In a CSV or XML feed

Fill the description column with the text from the product page, plain text, no HTML, up to 5,000 characters. Do not copy the title into it and do not add prices, “free shipping” or sale dates: the specification forbids promotional text in the description as it does in the title. If the source system has no description, the page does not either, and the fix belongs there first.

How long until Merchant Center clears it

The warning drops on the next fetch that carries a description; the Needs attention page reflects it within 24–72 hours. Performance follows as Google re-indexes the text, which takes a little longer than the status change.

What FeedRobin does about it

The free check counts products with no description and, separately, products whose description is under about 50 characters, because a line that short gives a channel nothing to match against. We do not write descriptions for you: Google compares the feed text with the page text, so a description invented here and absent there would be a mismatch we created. What we do is clean formatting per channel, stripping HTML for Google and keeping the text within each channel’s limits, so the description you write once arrives correctly everywhere.

Sources

• How to fix: Missing product description — Google Merchant Center Help
• Description [description] and structured description [structured_description] — Google Merchant Center Help
• Product issues (Content API for Shopping): the issue codes and the titles Merchant Center shows — Google Merchant Center Help