API access to Merchant Center

Merchant API allows you to interact directly with Merchant Center, vastly increasing the efficiency of managing large or complex Merchant Center accounts. They both enable programmatic access to complex account structures, product data management, insights, and other capabilities to power organic and Shopping ads experiences on Google, while being a complementary interface to the Merchant Center platform.

On this page

• Debug API errors
• API diagnostics
• Review API requests
• View failed API requests

Debug API errors

Errors with your API requests can prevent your store from managing your presence on Google and from reaching online customers. To diagnose and fix errors with your API requests, access the “API diagnostics” tab, which allows you to:

• View all the successful and failed API requests for a selected time period
• Determine the number of successful and failed requests per API version, service, and method
• Review examples of failed requests

API diagnostics

Errors from your API requests may prevent your products from showing on Google. Follow the directions below to review the errors:

1. In your Merchant Center account, navigate to Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select API diagnostics.
3. In the “API diagnostics” page, you can monitor, diagnose, and fix errors with your API requests. You can also determine which methods cause critical errors across API versions.

Review API requests

There are 2 main parts of the "API diagnostics" page:

• Your API calls: A timeline graph that shows the number of successful and failed API requests for a specific time period.
• API calls performance: A table that shows the total API requests and the number of failed API requests.

To review API requests:

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select API diagnostics.
3. Use the "Time period" filter to specify the time period.
4. Use the filter bar on top of the page to specify the API service request and method (for example, products with the "Insert" method) that you want to review. Both the table and the timeline update to show the specific API service request and method.

View failed API requests

When the table displays the results for your selected data range, you can browse through the listed services and methods to quickly determine the causes of the failed API requests. By default, the errors are listed by service name, but you can change the sort order by selecting a column header.

To view the failed requests:

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select API diagnostics.
3. Go to the “API calls performance” table, and select the items under the “Failed calls” column to view more details of your failed API requests.
4. Use the details under the “All errors for products / insert” section that appears as a guideline to fix failed API requests.