Google Merchant Center - Expiry date format changed.

[PCInk]

Whatever you call Merchant Center/Shopping/Base, the expiry date format has changed at Google's end with no warning.

Dates need to have the correct number of digits for month and day.

So 2011-6-28 is now a failure and 2011-06-28 should be accepted, though I haven't tried it without the time on the end.

It recommends that you add "THH:MM:SS".

So what I have tried is 2011-06-28T23:59:59 and that format is accepted.

[CPC_Andrew]

PCInk thanks for the update. I forwarded this to our tech team. Not sure if the change has taken place on Google Product Search US but it's interesting that you noticed this.

A few months ago Google began flagging certain product attribute formats within the Merchant Center that needed adjusting and I can't remember if this was one of them or not.

As always it's good to frequently check for errors, hopefully you caught it before your listings got pulled!

[g1smd]

Google is merely implementing RFC 3339, the roots of which came from ANSI X3.30 which was first published in the early 1970s.

When the time zone isn't stated, the assumption should be that the zone is UTC+0000.

[CPC_Andrew]

If you don't know about the expiration column it's likely best to keep it blank as there's no real purpose to it.