Price is the required product feed attribute that tells Google Merchant Center and Meta Catalog what a shopper pays for an item, submitted as the <g:price> tag in XML feeds or the price column in CSV/TSV feeds. It must be a plain number followed by a three-letter ISO 4217 currency code, such as 49.90 USD, and it has to match the price a shopper actually sees on the product landing page at the moment Google or Meta crawls it.

Why It Matters

A feed price that drifts from the live checkout price is one of the most common causes of item disapproval and account-level policy strikes, because both Google and Meta periodically re-crawl landing pages to confirm price and availability match. Retailers running promotions need to represent the discount through the separate sale-price field rather than editing price directly, since overwriting price to reflect a temporary markdown breaks the reference point shoppers use to judge a deal. Feeds that keep price perfectly synced with the storefront, including tax where required, are also the foundation for dynamic pricing strategies, where bid and creative logic respond to real-time margin rather than a stale catalog export.

How It Works

Google requires price on every submitted item unless the product is a variant priced identically to its parent, and rejects the value if the currency code doesn't match the target country's expected currency (for example, submitting a USD price into a feed targeting the German Merchant Center). Meta Catalog follows the same numeric-plus-currency format but is more forgiving about mixed currencies across a single feed, since currency is often set at the catalog or ad-account level rather than validated per row. Neither platform accepts price ranges, bundled multi-currency strings, or a bare currency symbol in place of the ISO code -- the value has to be a clean decimal number followed by the code. When a market includes VAT or sales tax in the displayed price, that amount must already be folded into price rather than left to the separate tax attribute, which exists specifically for jurisdictions like the US where tax is calculated at checkout instead of shown upfront. Retailers looking to push this further into automated bid and creative logic can see the mechanics laid out in Unlock Higher Campaign ROI with Dynamic Remarketing Feed Optimization.

Example

<item>
  <g:id>SKU-88213</g:id>
  <title>Stainless Steel French Press - 34oz</title>
  <link>https://example-shop.com/products/french-press-34oz</link>
  <g:price>39.00 USD</g:price>
  <g:sale_price>29.00 USD</g:sale_price>
  <g:availability>in stock</g:availability>
  <g:brand>Carrow</g:brand>
</item>

Related Concepts

Price rarely stands alone in a feed: it pairs with sale price whenever a promotion is live, with tax in markets where the displayed amount excludes what's owed at checkout, and it becomes the input variable for dynamic pricing rules that adjust bids or pause campaigns as margins shift. Getting this one field consistently accurate across every SKU is usually the single highest-leverage fix in a feed audit, since a wrong price undermines every other optimization built on top of it.