Missing shipping weight
What causes the "Missing shipping weight" error in Merchant Center and how to fix it.
This error means Google needs the shipping_weight attribute to calculate a carrier rate, but it wasn't submitted. Fix it by adding shipping_weight with a valid unit to the affected products.
What triggers it
"Missing shipping weight" appears when your shipping is set up to be calculated by weight (carrier-calculated rates are the most common case) but the shipping_weight attribute wasn't submitted for one or more products. Without it, Google has no way to work out what the carrier would actually charge, so the product can't serve correctly.
It's usually not a deliberate omission: weight is often stored on a parent product in your platform and doesn't automatically carry over to every variant, so a batch of variants ends up without it.
How /tools helps
Weight and dimension fields are checked as part of the feed's shipping consistency review, so products missing shipping_weight where your rates need it are flagged before Google rejects them, and enrichment writes fixes to a supplemental layer without touching your source platform data.
Step by step
- Confirm your shipping is weight-based. This error mainly applies when your account shipping settings use carrier-calculated or weight-based rates. If so, Google needs a weight for every product to work out the cost.
- Add shipping_weight to the affected products. Submit a value with a valid unit, kg or lb, for each product Diagnostics flags. Variants often need this set individually rather than inherited from a parent.
- Check for systematic gaps. If many products are affected at once, it's usually a feed export or platform field that isn't mapping weight through correctly, rather than dozens of individual oversights.
- Re-submit and confirm the error clears. Once shipping_weight is present, the item should stop serving without a computable rate within the normal crawl window.