Google Merchant Center management

Before we look at a single product we check the account itself. Is the website claimed and verified by the right party. Do the business details, contact routes and returns policy meet the current requirements. Are shipping services set up per country with real rates rather than a placeholder, and does tax match how you actually charge it. Account-level problems disapprove everything at once, so they get fixed first. This step usually takes a day and it is the one most often skipped by whoever set the account up originally.

A disapproval list is not a to-do list in the order Google prints it. We sort it by the revenue behind each product, so the items that were selling get fixed on day one and the long tail follows. Most disapprovals fall into a handful of causes: missing identifiers, image problems, a price or availability that does not match the page, a policy category that needs different handling, or a landing page that returns an error to Google's crawler but not to you. Each cause gets one fix rather than a hundred individual edits.

Google compares the price and availability in your feed against what its crawler sees on the product page. Any gap risks a price mismatch disapproval, and repeated gaps risk the account. The usual culprits are currency rounding, tax shown differently on the page than in the feed, a sale price that expired in one place but not the other, and pages that show a different price to logged-in customers. We line up the two, then set automatic item updates where it makes sense so short-lived changes correct themselves.

Free product listings put approved items on Google without ad spend. Promotions attach an offer to a listing. Product ratings pull your review scores into the display. Each has its own requirements, and each is available to stores that have already done the feed work. We enable what fits, connect the review source where one exists, and check what actually appears. Nothing here replaces paid Shopping, but for a store already paying for the data quality, the extra placement is free.

Merchant Center gives notice before it removes an account, and the notice is easy to miss in an inbox nobody reads. We check the diagnostics every week: new disapprovals, items dropping out, warnings with a deadline, and any change in the number of approved products against your catalogue size. A sudden drop of a few hundred items is almost always one broken rule rather than a hundred problems. You get a short written note each month covering what changed and what needed a decision from you.