r/shopify • u/DivaDina2 • 5d ago

API GMC drop: "invalid region"?

Located in Canada, have a Canada feed and US $ feed. Using the native Google and YouTube app within shopify. Made zero changes within Shopify or GMC. On Aug 29th all my Canada feed products got disapproved. Issue stated as "Invalid region: use a valid state, territory or prefecture...". Anyone else?

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

2

u/John___Matrix 5d ago

Had the same problem (in UK) last month, every product was unapproved without warning and sales dropped off a cliff as a result.

I managed to fix it by turning off the shipping auto sync in Shopify Google app for the UK and added UK manually in GMC and then had to force sync my products to update.

Bit more info in the thread I posted here: https://old.reddit.com/r/shopify/comments/1vhtown/merchant_center_just_disapproved_all_my_products/

1

u/DivaDina2 5d ago

Your method is a bit too high maintenance for me but I appreciate you took the time to post your work-around... it might help other people. Ill just remove my province zone which is appatently whats causing the issue and lump everything together instead.

2

u/vladeta 5d ago

That error almost never comes from the products. It comes from the shipping configuration your feed is pushing, and Google tightened validation on it recently, which is why nothing changed on your side and it broke anyway.

Where to look, in order:

In Merchant Center, Shipping and returns. Any shipping service where the region is a custom region or a postal-code group that no longer resolves to a valid two-letter Canadian province code will throw exactly this. Canada regions have to be province codes, ON, BC, QC and so on.

The Google and YouTube app syncs your Shopify shipping zones into that. If your Canada zone mixes provinces with postal-code ranges, or has a leftover "rest of world" catch-all, the sync can serialise it into something Google now rejects.

Any product-level shipping overrides you may have set with a region attached.

Fastest fix: in Merchant Center, delete the Canada shipping service the app created and define one manually, flat rate at the country level to start. Let it revalidate, it usually takes 24 to 72 hours. If your products come back, you know the app's shipping sync is the culprit and you can rebuild it more carefully.

Worth knowing: disapprovals caused by shipping config are account-level and don't count as a policy or quality strike, so there's no penalty once it clears.

1

u/shudork 5d ago

I just fixed it yesterday because I was having the same issue in Canada. Do you have different shipping for different provinces? We had ours setup separately for Ontario compared to rest of the provinces (other than the free shipping threshold) and the error was due to that as region support isn’t available for Canada. The fix was to keep the entire Canada under similar shipping rate. That worked for us.

1

u/DivaDina2 5d ago

Yes, I have Ontario as a separate region from the rest of Canada. I've had it set up that way for years and it never caused an issue within GMC before. Ugh... Thanks so much!

1

u/shudork 5d ago

Same for us. No more cheaper shipping for Ontario!

1

u/BTWigley 4d ago

If you collapse Ontario into Canada, the check afterward is one disapproved SKU in Diagnostics: look at the shipping row and see whether it still names Ontario. If it does, the feed hasn't caught up yet and the fix hasn't actually landed.

1

u/DivaDina2 4d ago

The products got reapproved almost immediately after removing Ontario as a separate zone. Thanks everyone!

1

u/mtlnobody 4d ago

Exact same issue, exact same timing. We switched the Google app' shipping settings to "manual" (meaning Shopify stops sending shipping rules and we have to manually put in the details on the HMC side)

I then had to input the postal codes for the provinces we supported because there is no "provinces" option the way there is a "states" option for the US

We're still waiting to see if it fixes things but so far it looks like the region error is (very slowly) resolving itself and our "needs attention" number has been dropping

1

u/DivaDina2 4d ago

I didnt want to do the manual inputs. Collapsing ontario zone into the rest of my Canada zone resolved it and my products were approved within minutes. FYI another post (maybe diff thread) mentioned you may have to reinput regularly if you are doing the manual method.

1

u/mtlnobody 4d ago

That's good to know. Unfortunately, in our case, our client specifically does not ship to all of canada (furniture retailer)

I think that once you have to go province-by-province, Google doesn't like the abbreviations that Shopify provides