Convert a Google Shopping XML feed to Excel

Why edit your XML feed in Excel?

A Google Shopping feed has one <item> tag per product, with dozens of fields (g:title, g:price, g:description, g:availability, g:gtin…). Editing that in a text editor is tedious and error-prone: one unclosed tag and the whole feed is rejected.

In a spreadsheet, each product becomes a row and each field a column. You can sort, filter, find-and-replace, recompute prices with a formula, or fix 5,000 titles in minutes — exactly what Excel is built for.

The steps

1. Export your XML feed from Google Merchant Center (or grab the file generated by your CMS / PIM).
2. Drop the file on ExcelifyXML: a free preview immediately shows the first rows, one per product (<item>). Confirm to get the editable CSV (1 credit).
3. Open the CSV in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and make your edits (titles, prices, descriptions, availability…).
4. On the Rebuild page, drop the edited CSV with its skeleton.json: the XML is rebuilt with the exact feed structure.
5. Re-import the XML into Google Merchant Center.

What the CSV looks like

Each <item> becomes a row, each field a column that keeps its Google name (g:id, g:title, g:price…). Grouped fields, such as shipping, get one column per sub-field: g:shipping.g:country, g:shipping.g:price. Repeated fields are numbered: g:additional_image_link[0], g:additional_image_link[1].

<item>
  <g:id>TV_123456</g:id>
  <g:title>LG 22LB4510 - 22" LED TV - 1080p (FullHD)</g:title>
  <g:price>159.00 USD</g:price>
  <g:shipping>
    <g:country>US</g:country>
    <g:price>14.95 USD</g:price>
  </g:shipping>
  <g:gtin>71919219405200</g:gtin>
</item>

g:id , g:title , g:price , g:shipping.g:country , g:shipping.g:price , g:gtin
TV_123456 , LG 22LB4510 - 22" LED TV - 1080p (FullHD) , 159.00 USD , US , 14.95 USD , 71919219405200

What comes back

The rebuilt XML keeps the <rss> root, the <channel> header, the g: namespaces and the field order, so your feed stays readable by Merchant Center. Values containing HTML or special characters are written back as CDATA.

Empty self-closing tags (e.g. <g:sale_price/>) don't come back: an empty cell writes nothing. For Google, an empty tag and a missing field have the same effect.

Adding, deleting, filling in

• Add a product: add a row. Delete a product: delete its row.
• Add a field that didn't exist, such as a sale price: add a column named g:sale_price. It becomes a tag at the end of each product; products whose cell is empty don't get one.
• Recompute prices with a formula: then paste the result as values, and keep the currency in the cell ("139.00 USD"). Check the decimal separator before rebuilding if your Excel uses a comma.

Common Merchant Center errors

• Price without currency: g:price must hold the amount and the currency, for instance "159.00 USD".
• Title too long: Google accepts 150 characters at most. A =LEN() column next to the titles spots them before upload.
• Misspelled availability: keep exactly the values Google expects (in stock, out of stock, preorder, backorder).
• GTINs changed by Excel: see below.

Watch out for GTINs in Excel

Opened by double-click, the CSV is read by Excel as numbers: a 13-digit GTIN becomes "3.61235E+12" and its last digits are lost when the file is saved. Open the CSV with Data › From Text/CSV instead, then “Transform Data”, giving the g:gtin column the Text type.

From the preview, then on the result screen, ExcelifyXML points out the columns Excel is likely to change. And if a code still turned into scientific notation, the reconstruction stops and shows you the column and rows at stake, rather than producing a wrong feed.

• EAN, GTIN and lost zeros in Excel

Your data stays private

Your file is processed in memory on European servers then deleted immediately — it's never stored. No install, no third-party tool, everything happens online.