Two things this week that cost Indian sellers real money because nobody tells them upfront.
1. Google Merchant Center does not always disapprove a missing GTIN - it just makes your product invisible
If you sell branded products on Google Shopping and skip the GTIN (barcode) field, you would expect Merchant Center to flag it and reject the item. Often it does not. Google's own Merchant Center help says it plainly: a product that has a manufacturer GTIN but is submitted without one "may have limited visibility" - not disapproved, just quietly suppressed. Your feed still shows the item as "Active", so there is no error to chase down. You just do not show up.
There is a second, sneakier trap: some barcodes that scan fine at a till are not valid GTINs to Google. GS1's restricted prefix ranges - 02, 04, and 2 (used for internal/in-store barcodes), plus 05, 98, 99 (coupon ranges) - are rejected outright. If a product's barcode falls in one of those ranges, the fix is not to keep resubmitting the same number; it is to omit the GTIN field and set identifier_exists to false.
We set up Merchant Center accounts and product feeds ourselves (fixed Rs 4,999, live in 3-5 working days - https://zoopcoder.com/services/google-merchant-center-setup.php) and this is one of the first things we check before touching anything else.
2. A Shopify-WooCommerce migration will never carry over your customers' passwords - plan for it
Moving a store between Shopify and WooCommerce is a real rebuild, not a one-click transfer - no tool moves theme, gateway or tax settings automatically. Two things genuinely do not survive either direction, and one of them surprises almost every seller who has not done this before:
- Reviews. Shopify's own migration documentation says it outright: "you can't export or migrate reviews from WooCommerce to Shopify." The reverse has the same limitation.
- Customer passwords. Shopify does not store the password hashes WooCommerce uses (and vice versa), so no migration - including ours - can carry logins across. Every migrated customer has to reset or reactivate their account once after go-live, either through "forgot password" or by re-registering with the same email, which restores their order history immediately.
We migrate up to 150 products, in either direction, for a fixed Rs 5,499 (6-8 working days - https://zoopcoder.com/services/shopify-woocommerce-migration.php), and we hand over a ready bulk account-invite list so that password reset happens in one push instead of customers discovering it one at a time.
Disclosure: I work at ZoopCoder (https://zoopcoder.com), an Indian dev shop - sharing what we've actually run into doing this work, not a general listicle.
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