Quotas and limits

AI-generated Key Takeaways

• Merchant API utilizes automatic quota adjustments for products and accounts services based on usage, tracking requests per-method and applying quotas to specific CSS groups or accounts.

• Updates are limited to twice per day for products and once per day for sub-accounts.

• You can request quota increases for services other than products and accounts, exceeding daily quotas, or requiring temporary increases by contacting Google Merchant Center support.

• Exceeding quotas results in specific errors, such as quota/request_rate_too_high (per minute) and quota/daily_limit_exceeded (per day), with instructions for checking and requesting increases.

• Resource representations have inherent limits, notably affecting shippingsettings with restrictions on shipping services, groups, labels, and table dimensions.

Your Merchant account and your use of Merchant API are subject to quotas and limits.

Note: Quotas and limits are subject to elimination, reduction, or change at any time, without notice.

Update policy

Merchant API enforces the following policies in terms of updates:

• You can only update your products up to twice per day.
• You can only update your sub-accounts once per day.

Method call quotas

Merchant API automatically adjusts call quotas for your products and accounts based on your usage.

Here's how we track your quota usage:

• Quotas are per-method. For example, the get method has a separate quota from the update method.
• Each request counts once, regardless of its type. For example, we count a list request of 250 items once, not as 250 get requests.
• Quota is charged based on the user who makes the API request. If the user is a direct member of an advanced account, the quota will be charged at the level of the advanced account.
• Quotas apply to the Comparison Shopping Services (CSS) group, CSS, account, or sub-accounts against which you authenticate when you make the call. For example, if you authenticate as an advanced account, calls count against your advanced account's quota, but if you authenticate as one of your sub-accounts, calls count against the sub-account's quota.

The diagram shows the hierarchy of CSS groups, CSS, accounts, and sub-accounts.

Method call quota changes from Content API for Shopping

If you used Content API for Shopping, note the following method call quota changes in Merchant API:

• The absence of custom batching doesn't affect quota calculation. For example, a batch request containing 500 insert requests is charged as 500 individual insert method requests.
• Quota automation for accounts and products remains in place.
• To determine your current quota usage and limits, including automation and overrides, use the Quota.list method.

Note: For the accounts.list method, quota and limits usage are charged for each user, and not for the Merchant Center ID or the advanced account ID. To list sub-accounts, you should use the accounts.listSubaccounts method, which is more suitable for this use case.

Check your call quotas

To check the current call quota and usage for an account, call quotas.list with the name of the account.

Automatic quota only applies to the products and accounts services. If you need an increased quota for any other service, you're hitting your daily quota for the products or accounts services, or you need a temporary increase for the accounts or products services, contact us with the following information:

• Your Merchant Center ID
• The methods you've reached your quota limits on
• An estimate of the number of calls per day you need for those methods
• The reason you need a quota increase
• Whether it's a temporary or permanent increase

We recommend checking your quotas periodically to ensure you have sufficient quota for your implementation, or how your quota is adjusted automatically.

Errors

If you exceed the quotas, you receive the following errors:

• Per minute: quota/request_rate_too_high
• Per day: quota/daily_limit_exceeded

To view your quotas and usage, and request a per-day or per-minute quota increase, see Check your call quotas.

The following errors can't be resolved by automatic quota increases, and require you to request additional quota of items, feeds or sub-accounts:

• too_many_items: Merchant quota exceeded
• too_many_subaccounts: Maximum number of sub-accounts reached

Account limits

The accounts.limits.get and accounts.limits.list methods let you check limits on account-level entities. You can use these methods to check product limits.

To retrieve a specific product limit, for example, to get the Ads EEA quota of an account, you need to specify the account ID and limit ID in your call to accounts.limits.get. The limit ID is a combination of the limit type and scope. For example, products~ADS_EEA for products targeting ads in EEA, and products~ADS_NON_EEA for products targeting ads outside of EEA.

Here's an example request to get the products~ADS_EEA limit for a given account:

GET https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1/accounts/{ACCOUNT_ID}/limits/products~ADS_EEA

To learn about the available limit IDs for your account use accounts.limits.list with a filter for type="products":

GET https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1/accounts/{ACCOUNT_ID}/limits?filter=type%3D%22products%22

For more information about product quotas, see Understanding quotas in Google Merchant Center.

Resource representation limits

The following limits describe notable restrictions for certain string values and array fields within the resource representations used in the Merchant API. These limits are the same for both the Merchant API and their corresponding feature in the Merchant Center.

Note that this list of limits may not be complete. We won't extend these limits.

Resource	Field	Limit
shippingsettings	Shipping services per country (services). Shipping groups per shipping service (rateGroups). Labels per shipping group (applicableShippingLabels). Subtables per shipping group (subtables). Number of rows or columns in a single rate table. Length of shipping labels.	20 20 30 100 150 100

The number of rows or columns in a rate table affects the following array fields:

• Array fields within rowHeaders or columnHeaders:
  • prices[]
  • weights[]
  • numberOfItems[]
  • postalCodeGroupNames[]
  • locations[]
  • rows[]
  • cells[]