Last week some merchants began reporting problems with the Google Base feed. An error message displayed, "The attribute is missing a required subattribute. tax:country:US rate: 0." Users on Bonanzle and Atomic Mall were among those affected, and the two online marketplaces changed their XML feed to compensate for the problem by removing the tax attribute from the feeds.

Merchants routinely send product feeds to Google Base in order to get indexed by Google Product Search (Google Shopping). Including attributes in Google Base feeds help merchants increase their products' exposure on Google.