Those of you who use the Google and YouTube Shopify app to sync your products automatically from Shopify to Google Merchant Center may have a huge headache to deal with after August 18, 2026. The rumor is that you will need to reinstall the app by this date and when you do this, every product ID gets rewritten.
Emmanuel Flossie covered this issue back in January, but Google has not acknowledged the issue until recently and still has not confirmed it has dealt with it. Emmanuel Flossie posted a video on this and said, if you're planning to migrate the Google & YouTube app for Shopify by uninstalling and reinstalling, don't do it. The problem is that when you migrate the app, your product IDs will change from:
- OLD: Shopify_US_12345_67890 (or AU, GB, etc.)
- NEW: Shopify_ZZ_12345_67890
This is when the Google Merchant API is replacing the Content API, this is tied to this migration.
Here is his video explaining this:
Emmanual thought that maybe it was fixed but based on the comments on his LinkedIn post on Friday, it was not fixed.
Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, finally responded to the concerns on this and posted on LinkedIn saying:
Hi all, I've been tagged in this post a couple of times and just want to let you know that we're looking into this.
The issue with this happening, is that all your performance history will disappear and it might take for your Google Ads performance data to catch back up. Losing those IDs can cause issues with your campign performance.
Matinique Roelse wrote on LinkedIn said the fix is to "stop using the Shopify app for your product feed before the deadline. Move to a feed management tool like Channable. That way you control your own product IDs and nothing changes when the app reinstalls."
Emmnual also posted this on the Google Merchant Center Forums and on LinkedIn.
I'll keep you posted on whether Google will actually fix this or what the solution is for this. As you know, August 18th is a bit over a month away.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
