What are the Google's requirements for product description?

Google requires that each product on Google Shopping has an associated description. This description must match the one from the landing page (i.e the product file). For more information on Google's guidelines about product description, click here.

Our module lets you select which kind of product description you want to export in your feed :

• Short description
• Long description
• Both
• Meta-description

Whatever the option you choose, it must respect the Google constraints :

Description length

The maximum length of the description is 5,000 characters. In most cases, it should be more than enough, even if you choose the long description or both. If not, shorten your description or use the short description instead.

However, it's strongly recommended to list the most important details in the first 160 - 500 characters because from a certain number of characters, the description will be truncated on Google Shopping and users will need to click to read more.

Invalid characters

In addition, Google only accepts standard / valid UTF-8 characters.
The module does its best to clean up the description for you, but in some cases, you may get an error that there is an invalid character. In that case, Google will tell you which product is affected (Google gives you the line of the XML file which is concerned).

If you have copied and pasted your descriptions from advanced text editors like Microsoft Word, or if you use import tools to create your products on your Prestashop website, there is a very high chance that the issue comes from there. In general, don't copy/paste from an advanced editor like Word. It's better to use a plain text editor such as Notepad or Notepad++. It will not generate non-standard characters that MS Word does. Also note that the import tools often generate special characters that will not be accepted by Google.

If you get an error due to special characters, delete the characters that could be problematic in your descriptions.