Suspended Google Merchant Center Account? – Reasons and Fixes (2022)

Suspended Google Merchant Center Account? – Reasons and Fixes (2022)

It is really very annoying and frustrating when you find yourself with a suspended Google Merchant Center Account. But believe me, you are not alone and most of the eCommerce vendors face the problem of merchant center account suspension.

The most unfortunate thing is that Google may suspend your Google Merchant Center Account without any warning or explanation.

A Suspended Google Merchant Center account can be un-suspended if you know the reasons and the ways to fix them.

To help you with the process I am going to explain the reasons for suspension and how to fix them fast.

Let’s dive into the details.

Reasons for Suspended Google Merchant Center Account

The most common reasons that Google suspends a Merchant Center Account at the account level include:

1. Business details not filled
2. Missing Shipping Services under Shipping and Returns Settings
3. Having more than one store sites
4. Using a virtual office or PO Box as  (Google validates only real Address and if you have the address approved as a Google Business profile its easier for Google to validate your address )

The most common reason Google suspends a product is a misrepresentation of self or the products and the Store. Reasons include:

1. Products missing with essential information.
2. The online store not working or not created with a custom domain, as google matches the information on the main domain with your URL.
3. Missing essential information on Store like Policy pages, contact details, and address.

Overview of Google Shopping Policies

Google mainly has policies around four areas and they are as below:

3. Prohibited content: This includes products or practices that Google considers fake or dangerous or products that allow dangerous behavior. Wrong content and unsupported Shopping ad content fall under this policy section.
4. Prohibited practices: This refers to system manipulations, including what Google recognizes as malicious content or sites that offer very little additional value. In addition, this extensive policy is applied to products or accounts that are collecting our user data irresponsibly or wrong misrepresentation of products. This is the most common reason for online sellers facing suspended Google Merchant Center Account.
5. Restricted content: Restricted content includes political and copyrighted content. Also gambling or adult content and prohibited products like alcoholic beverages also fall under this policy.
6. Editorial and technical: This policy ensures that shopping ads should meet the high professional and editorial norms and standards. The use of gimmick words, letters, numbers, punctuations, and websites that are not working optimally falls under this policy.

Account Level Google Merchant Center Account Suspension – Reasons and Fix

Google keeps on reviewing your merchant center account periodically. You will get a warning if there is any change on your eCommerce site and normally you get a week’s time to fix the issue before your account gets suspended.

In case of an account-level suspension, you will get a warning like this: “Data quality suspension warning of your Google Merchant Center account.” Google suspends your account and sends you a series of mail if the issue remains there till your notice period is over.

Till the issue is resolved your products will not be shown in Shopping ads but will be available for other destinations. This you can check on the home and diagnostics pages of your account.

In order to request Google to review your account and to lift the suspension you need to follow the below steps:

1. Check for any data errors and fix any critical notification in your Google Merchant Center account.
2. Now you should reload your updated data feed to your account.
3. In case of minor errors, you can contact Google Merchant Center’s helpline or Google rep to expedite the review process. Although there is no guarantee this will work or not particularly if you have a history of account errors.
4. Submit your account to Google for review on automatic mode.

Google Merchant Center Account-Level Review Process 

You can review using the Request review button, in case your merchant center account is suspended. If there are no other pending requests you can only request a review. But if your merchant center account has several policy issues in the same country of sale, the review will be applicable to all the issues for that country of sale.

Follow the below-mentioned steps to request Google to review the suspended Google Merchant Center account:

1. Make sure that you have fixed any issues and that the products uploaded to your account are in stock.
2. Log in to your Google Merchant Center Account.
3. Click “Products” and then “Diagnostics” from the navigation menu.
4. Choose the “Account issues” tab and navigate to the account-level issue you want Google to review.
5. When you rectify the issues select “Request review” and follow the pop-up prompts until the “Request review” check box comes up.

This process may usually take up to seven days. You will receive an email notification on completion.

Product-Level Google Merchant Center Account Suspension – Reasons and Fix

When your product feed data is not in line with Google’s product data specifications you may find yourself with a suspended product or a suspended Google Merchant Center account based on the criticality of the issues.

This is possible that anyone product in your feed could be disapproved of in different countries for different reasons based on the policies for that country. In this case, you can use shopping ads excluded countries attribute to exclude products from feeds allocated to specific countries.

Depending on the niche of the products, every product has different data specifications and product data feeds need to match store site data. All these disapproved or suspended products will be removed from Shopping ads.

You need to follow the following steps to fix suspended Google Merchant Center account or shopping products:

1. Go to your Google Merchant Center Diagnostics page and review the “Item issues” tab.
2. You can go to “Learn more” links to find steps to resolve your specific issues.
3. Ensure that you apply long-term strategies to prevent future suspensions.
4. Rectify and reload product data for review. This will take up to 12 hours.

Ways to Prevent Common Product Disapprovals 

The most common product suspension reason may be due to product price and availability changes. You need to enable automatic item updates to prevent these mismatches to occur. Also one of the most common reasons for suspended products in Google Merchant Account is promotional images overlays. In order to prevent fix this, you can use Google’s “automatic image improvements” feature.

Product Warning and Google Shopping Product-Level Review Process

In case of product data issues like missing unique product identifiers (UPIs), your ad performance will be adversely affected in spite of the fact that your products will still appear in your Shopping ads. The data without UPI’s present in your ad groups will receive higher priority.

You will receive a warning from Google that your Google Shopping ad performance is diminishing Google Shopping ad performance is diminishing and if the issue remains unresolved your product or account may be suspended.

Also, when the product data does not contain GTIN / MPN or as per knowledge GTIN you furnished is right but still, you receive a warning, you should request a manual review by following these steps:

1. Go to Merchant Center account  and click “products” then “all products” from the navigation menu,
2. Click a product’s title to go to its product page.
3. Choose “Item status,” then “Policy violations: Product data GTIN requirements.”
4. Under “Actions,” click “Request review.”
5. In this final step, you should check the box that you have understood GTIN attribute requirements and select “Request manual review.”

Shopping Ads Suspension due to Misrepresentation of Self of Product – Reasons and Fix

There are three main causes for your Google Shopping product suspension due to conflict with Google’s misrepresentation policy.

1. Omission of Relevant Information

This is a very common message from Google to the merchants that their store or product is missing vital information and this breaks Google’s misrepresentation policy.

In order to fix this issue merchants should:

1. Ensure that your product feed data is updated and similar to your store information.
2. Make sure your important website pages like your returns policy and tax or shipping rate pages are clear to the buyers.
3. Your product fee URLs should match specific product variant pages.
4. Make sure you have turned on Google’s “Automatic item updates” feature.
5. You should invest in dynamic data feed tools if your store needs product data changes on daily basis.

2. Unavailable Promotions

Your products may also get suspended if your promotional Shopping products are either out of stock or the prices are not as same as in your store.  The reason for this may be due to your store’s using JavaScript.

Above all, if you adjust your sales price on your website and Google could not pick up the change, it may flag a product as incorrectly priced. This is mainly a concern for multi-channel sellers running multiple Shopping ads.

Steps to fix this issue:

1. Use tools like schema.org to review the structured data of product pages.
2. To prevent overselling products across multiple channels use inventory thresholds.
3. to ensure that product feed price and availability data are updated regularly enables Google’s automatic item updates.

3. Untrustworthy Promotions

When Google feel that your products are concealing information you may get your product or store suspension on account of violating Google’s “Untrustworthy promotions” policies

Steps to fix this issue:

1. Make sure you have excluded any products from your feed that aren’t allowed in a few countries as laid out in Google Shopping policies.
2. Review warning notifications to understand why Google has flagged your product or account.
3. It is very important that your store’s contact details match the data as in your Merchant Center account. You can get an automatic flag from Google even in case of a typo error.
4. Ensure you have put the correct SKUs and GTINs in your feed.
5. Do a quick audit of the trustworthiness of your store.
6. Make sure your site has no security issues and it should be in line with these Google requirements.
7. To request an appeal or to get more information, you will need to contact Google support through your Merchant Center.

More Common Feed Errors and How to Fix Them

Below mentioned is the list of specific feed warnings and links with information on how to fix them:

• Unavailable mobile landing page
• Unavailable desktop landing page
• Target location without shipping and tax
• No tax or shipping
• Unsecure checkout
• Invalid value [price]
• Missing value [description]
• Text too short [description]
• Missing value [shipping]
• Ambiguous value [gtin]
• Invalid value [gtin]
• Missing value [gtin]
• Unsupported value (reserved) [gtin]
• Unsupported value (restricted) [gtin]
• Low image quality [image link]
• Invalid images

Final Words on Suspended Google Merchant Center Account

Now you have all the reasons for Suspended Google Merchant Center Account or suspended Google Shopping products along and how to fix them. By knowing all these you can always stay away from suspension by ensuring you maintain your product feeds, keep a regular check for critical errors.

Always keep a check on the warning emails and notifications and address them as early as possible if you want to prevent Google Merchant Center Suspension. You can watch the full video playlist on Google Merchant Center here. 

Still, many e-commerce vendors face issues with Google Merchant Center or Shopping Ads. But due to a lack of time and knowledge, they are unable to resolve the issues. In that case, you can always get help from a specialized Google Merchant Center Service Provider.

We at InfoTalks have helped many Merchants in India, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and many other countries to increase their online sales manifold that too seamlessly.

In case you also want us to manage your Google Merchant Center, feel free to contact us for FREE Consultation.

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