Google Shopping XML vs CSV

XML vs CSV for Google Shopping: the comparison

Every row below is drawn from Google Merchant Center help pages fetched on the date in the footnote: 'Create a product file for Merchant Center', 'Create a tab-delimited product data source', the 'RSS 2.0 specification' and the 'Product data specification'. Where the help does not state a fact, the cell says so.

What Google says about delimited text

Google's tab-delimited guide is blunt: the file must be tab-delimited plain text, the first line is the header and must contain attribute names separated by tabs, and each product is one line with each attribute separated by a tab. A cell may be empty when an attribute has no value. The product file guide tells Google Sheets users to download as .tsv and Excel users to save as tab-delimited .txt, and warns that missing tab separators, extra tabs or line breaks inside a field, and non-UTF-8 or UTF-16 encodings are the common processing errors. Multi-value attributes can be comma-separated in one cell or split into one column per value.

Note the wording: Google's current help describes the text option as tab-separated and does not name .csv. In practice 'CSV' is what every spreadsheet and most platform exports call a delimited file, which is why the query is phrased XML vs CSV. If your tool exports comma-separated and Merchant Center reports delimiter errors, export tab-separated instead; the attribute names and values do not change.

What Google says about XML

The RSS 2.0 specification page sets the structure: a channel with title, link and description, then one item per product, and the Merchant Center namespace declared as xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0". Every Merchant Center attribute tag needs the g: prefix; attributes without it are ignored, and elements from other RSS modules or custom namespaces are not processed. Item-level title, link and description are optional in RSS itself but required for product data, alongside price, id and condition. The file must include all products you want in Merchant Center, not only changes; removing a product from the file removes it from the account. Many namespace attributes may be repeated within one item, which is how multiple images or shipping entries are expressed. Atom 1.0 has its own page with the same ideas.

XML earns its 'large catalogs and automated systems' label because it is self-describing: nested and repeated values do not fight with a delimiter, and platform plugins have emitted it for years. It is also harder for a person to open, diff or fix in a spreadsheet, and a single unclosed tag stops the whole file.

The same product in both formats

Attribute names and values are identical; only the container changes. The 150-character title limit, the 5,000-character description limit and the '15.00 USD' price format from the product data specification apply equally.

id	title	price	availability	link
SKU-204	Patagonia Nano Puff Jacket Men's, Navy, L	239.00 USD	in_stock	https://store.example/p/nano-puff

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0">
 <channel>
  <item>
   <g:id>SKU-204</g:id>
   <g:title>Patagonia Nano Puff Jacket Men's, Navy, L</g:title>
   <g:price>239.00 USD</g:price>
   <g:availability>in_stock</g:availability>
   <g:link>https://store.example/p/nano-puff</g:link>
  </item>
 </channel>
</rss>

Which format a feed tool should produce

If a tool sits between your store and Merchant Center, the format question moves to the tool. Textfinity reads CSV and TSV exports and XML in Google Shopping's RSS or Atom shape (so a platform's Google feed plugin output is a fine input; a custom XML schema has to be exported as CSV), applies mapping and filter rules, and publishes a delimited CSV or TSV file on a stable URL. We register that URL with you in Merchant Center as a scheduled-fetch file source, and Google fetches hosted files every 24 hours. Textfinity does not write XML, so merchants who need an XML file for a non-Google destination that only reads RSS should keep their platform's XML export for that destination. For Merchant Center itself, the delimited file carries the same attributes and is easier to open, diff and profile.

The one place XML still wins is when you are hand-writing a feed from a system that produces nested data and have no tool in between. Everyone else benefits more from a flat file they can inspect.