Automatic item updates with schema.org microdata

Google Merchant Center recently added a feature called "Automatic item updates". This feature relies on schema.org microdata on your product pages to obtain up-to-date price and availability information about your products.

If you do not have schema.org microdata embedded in your product pages, you can not and should not enable this feature. If you do, then you will see errors in your account like, "Automatic item updates: Incorrect microdata price information" and "Missing schema.org microdata availability information". You can simply disable "Automatic Item Updates" to fix those errors.

Microdata is a short snippet of HTML that contains your product information. It has to be formatted a certain way. Here is a condensed example:

<body>
  <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
    <meta itemprop="sku" content="abc123" />
    <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
      <span itemprop="price">229.95</span>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>

The main advantage of this feature is that reduces the chances of a temporary item disapproval due to mismatched price or availability. However, you can achieve the same results by re-submitting your product feed whenever your price/availability changes substantially. Here are our recommendations:

Ensure your feed is set to Daily submission frequency from the Manage Feed > Modify Feed Settings page.
If available for your store platform, set your feed to Daily Plus submission frequency. This will automatically run a submission at least once per day and also within about an hour after you publish your store.
After significant changes to your catalog, run a Submit task on-demand by going to the Manage Feed page and clicking the Submit button. (There is no need to Refresh before submitting, because the Submit task also refreshes your product data.)

Remember, we do not charge any per-submission fees, so resubmitting/refreshing your feeds is always free. Also, our system fetches the latest product data from your store every time a feed is refreshed or submitted.