Product feeds
Merchant Center website requirements, walked through
Account suspensions usually trace to the store, not the feed. Every website requirement Merchant Center checks, page by page, and what to fix before a review.
By CartKernel · Published
When a Merchant Center account is suspended, the feed is rarely the cause. Item-level problems disapprove products one at a time. Account-level problems come from the website: what it says about who you are, how you ship, how you take returns, and whether what Google reads on the page agrees with what you submitted. This is a walk through each requirement in the order Google’s reviewers tend to find them, with the check to run on your own store before you submit or ask for a review.
Contact details a reviewer can find in one click
Your store needs to show who is behind it and how to reach you. In practice that means a business name that matches the name in Merchant Center, a physical address, and at least one direct contact route such as an email address or a phone number, all reachable from a footer link on every page. A contact form alone is a weak answer because it does not tell anyone where the business is.
Check that the name is the same everywhere: Merchant Center business information, the website footer, the terms page, the domain registration where visible, and the descriptor on the customer’s card statement. Mismatches between these are one of the patterns reviewers read as misrepresentation.
A return and refund policy that answers the real questions
Google’s misrepresentation policy treats unclear return and refund terms as a reason to suspend. The page has to say, in plain words, whether you accept returns, within how many days, in what condition, who pays return shipping, how refunds are issued and how long they take. If you do not accept returns for a category, say that plainly rather than leaving it out.
Link the page from the footer and, ideally, from the product page near the buy button. Then make the policy in Merchant Center’s shipping and returns settings say the same thing. A policy page that promises thirty days while the account says fourteen is a mismatch waiting to be found.
Shipping costs and delivery times stated before checkout
A shopper should be able to learn what delivery costs and how long it takes without adding anything to a cart. That means a shipping page with rates by region, the free-shipping threshold if there is one, handling time and transit estimates, and any regions you do not serve.
The Merchant Center side has its own rule: the shipping cost you submit must not be lower than what the customer is charged at checkout. Overestimating is tolerated, underestimating is a policy issue. If checkout charges by weight or by carrier rates, configure the account to match or to overstate. Whether shipping belongs in the account or the feed depends on how varied your rates are, and a shipping error is often just the two disagreeing.
A checkout that works, is secure, and shows the whole price
Google’s reviewers place a test order, or try to. The checklist:
- HTTPS on every page, including the cart and checkout, with a certificate that does not throw a browser warning.
- Products can be bought online, on the site, with a card. A page that says “call to order” or sends the buyer to another site does not qualify for Shopping ads.
- Accepted payment methods are visible before the buyer commits, and they work.
- Taxes, fees and shipping are shown before the final step, and the total does not change at the last moment.
- The currency at checkout is the currency of the target country and the currency in the feed.
- An order confirmation is sent.
Place a real order on your own store with an ordinary card, then refund it. If anything in the flow surprises you, it will surprise a reviewer more.
Prices and availability that agree with the page
Google crawls your landing pages and compares what it reads with the feed. A price that differs by a cent, a sale price shown without the original, or an out-of-stock page for an in-stock item disapproves the product, and a pattern of them raises the account’s risk. The usual causes are a fetch schedule that runs less often than prices change, currency rounding, a theme that renders price with JavaScript after the crawl, or promotional pricing applied at checkout only.
Product structured data on the page helps Google read the right numbers. Persistent mismatches are worth a proper look; we cover the mechanics in Merchant Center price mismatch and availability mismatch.
The store must look finished
The editorial and professional requirements are about whether the site is a real, working store. Reviewers look for:
- No placeholder text, lorem ipsum, or “coming soon” sections.
- No broken links in navigation or footer, no empty collections.
- No pages that load an error or hang.
- Legible copy without gimmicky capitalization or symbol spam, on the site and in the feed.
- A privacy policy and terms of service that exist and are linked.
- An about page that says something true about the business.
Run a crawl of the site and sort by status code. Every 404 and 500 inside the navigation should be fixed before submission, not after.
Google must be able to load the page it is checking
Merchant Center’s page checks come from Google’s own crawlers, and anything that stops them stops the review. Check that robots.txt does not block Googlebot or Storebot-Google, that there is no country restriction stopping requests from outside your region, that the product page is reachable without logging in, and that no interstitial covers the product content. Landing pages have to be in a language and currency Merchant Center supports for the target country, and the content shown to Google must be the content shown to a shopper.
Patterns that draw a misrepresentation review
None of these are policy violations on their own, and all of them are worth removing:
- A newly registered domain with no other footprint, submitting hundreds of products on day one.
- Prices far below every other seller of the same identifiable products.
- Countdown timers and stock warnings that reset on every visit.
- Reviews with no source, or trust badges from schemes you are not enrolled in.
- Policies that exist but are not honoured in support replies.
- A business name in the account that differs from the one on the site.
A misrepresentation flag is Google saying it cannot tell whether the store is what it claims. Everything above is about making that answer obvious.
The checklist before you submit
| Area | What to confirm |
|---|---|
| Identity | Same business name in Merchant Center, footer, terms and card descriptor; address and direct contact in the footer |
| Returns | Policy page with window, condition, cost and refund method; matches account settings |
| Shipping | Rates, regions and times on a page; account cost never below checkout cost |
| Checkout | HTTPS throughout; test order completed; totals shown before payment |
| Data match | Feed price, sale price and availability equal the page; structured data present |
| Quality | Zero broken links in navigation; no placeholder content; policies linked |
| Access | Googlebot and Storebot-Google allowed; no geo-blocking or login wall on product pages |
| Verification | Website claimed and verified in the account |
If the account is already suspended
Read the notification and identify the policy named, then fix everything on this list, not only the item cited. Reviews look at the whole store, and a second suspension for a different reason costs weeks. Request one review with a short factual note of what changed. How long a review takes varies, and repeated requests do not speed it up. If you would rather have someone who does this weekly run the audit first, that is what our policy compliance work is, and the suspended account page describes the steps in order.
Stores that build these pages properly at setup rarely see a suspension at all. Stores that bolt them on after one tend to find the review goes through on the second try, once every page says the same thing.