Google for WooCommerce

Dear Google Listings & Ads team,

I’m currently using your plugin across multiple WooCommerce stores and have encountered a recurring issue that may warrant a future enhancement.

When products use visual builders like WPBakery, the long description (post_content) often contains complex HTML structures and shortcodes. While WordPress renders this content correctly, Google Merchant Center frequently rejects it with the following error:

[description] This value should not be blank.

This appears to happen because the plugin sends the raw HTML content to Google without sanitizing or simplifying it. As a result, Google fails to parse the description and flags it as missing—even though it exists in WordPress.

Additionally, in PHP 8.3 environments, we’ve observed fatal errors when the plugin attempts to process serialized arrays without validating the data type. Specifically, the method MerchantStatuses::parse_presync_issue_text() throws a type error when it receives an array instead of a string.

Suggested improvements:

Sanitize product descriptions before sending them to Google using wp_strip_all_tags() and strip_shortcodes() to ensure clean, readable text.

Validate data types before passing values to parse_presync_issue_text() to prevent fatal errors in strict PHP environments.

Document or expand support for the _wc_gla_description_override meta field, allowing users to provide a clean fallback description when needed.

These changes would greatly improve compatibility with modern WordPress setups and prevent unnecessary server load caused by repeated sync failures.

Thank you for your continued work on this plugin — it’s a vital tool for WooCommerce merchants.

Best regards,