Catalog Preflight

What it does

Catalog Preflight is a free, offline checker for Google Merchant Center CSV/TSV feeds aimed at merchants and PPC agencies who want a quick deterministic QA pass before uploading a catalog. Validation checks Catalog Preflight parses Merchant Center CSV or TSV files and runs rule-based checks on each record. The checker flags required-field and format errors, duplicate product IDs, malformed prices and currency formats, GTIN check-digit failures, sale window validity, and simple shared-variant URL prompts. Local processing and data boundary The tool is distributed as a ZIP containing a single HTML+JS file you open in a modern browser; parsing, validation and export run locally in the browser. The distributed package includes a published engine version and a ZIP SHA256 for integrity checks. The landing page documents a Content-Security-Policy intended to block network requests in the downloadable distribution. Findings, export and reporting Result rows are reported at the item level with the record ID, the field in error, a reason, and a suggested next action. Findings can be exported as a fix-list CSV for batch remediation or printed as a report. The landing page shows that engine/version metadata is included in outputs. Limits and unsupported inputs This pilot accepts Merchant Center CSV and TSV only, with a documented 6 MB file size and 10,000-item limit for the free offline version. XML, JSON and native Shopify export formats, image checks, live site crawls and account uploads are outside this release; the tool does not perform suspension rescue or automated identifier resolution. Intended users and cautions The intended users are merchants and agencies who need a deterministic, offline QA pass before feed submission. The landing page emphasizes that some prompts require human context and that a clean Preflight check is not equivalent to Google approval.