To ensure the success of your products and to provide a good experience for potential customers, we've developed a set of policies and data quality requirements for Merchant Center.
On this page
- Review regions and fix issues
- Price and availability mismatch
- How to identify and fix mismatches
- Unsupported destination based on regional settings
- Frequently asked questions
Review regions and fix issues
In order to use the regions feature, each of your regions must meet the minimum requirements.
If you don’t meet the minimum requirements, you’ll notice an error message, with details in the “Issue” column on the “Regions” page. You can filter your regions by issue, or manually address them one by one. When you satisfy the necessary requirements, the error messages will disappear.
Price and availability mismatch
Price or availability mismatches occur when the information in your product feed differs from the price on your landing page or the structured data.
Common causes and resolutions
- Inconsistent Data: Inconsistent data happens when the price and availability in your Merchant Center feed do not match the final price on your landing page or in your website's microdata. This includes your currency and any taxes.
- Website Microdata: Ensure that the offer and price properties in your Schema.org markup match the price in your feed and the visual price on your landing page.
- Delayed Updates: To reduce delays, schedule your data source uploads through the Content API or Merchant API as soon as you update products on your website. If your product status changes frequently, increase the frequency of your uploads.
- Manual Edits: Manual edits to prices in Merchant Center override your feed data. Use the “Undo Edits” feature to sync your account with the feed again.
- Caching Issues: Clear your website cache to ensure Google's crawlers see your most current pricing data.
Regional specific causes
- IP Geolocation: Do not use IP geolocation to automatically change prices on your landing page, as Google crawlers may not see the correct regional price.
- Regional Settings: Verify that your regional settings in Merchant Center are configured correctly.
How to identify and fix mismatches
Step 1 of 3: Identify the issue
- In your Merchant Center account, go to Products under Products & store
in the left navigation menu.
- Select Needs attention tab within the products page.
- Look for issue titles like "Mismatched price," "Mismatched availability," or their regional counterparts.
- Select View samples to see specific affected products.
Step 2 of 3: Audit and Correct
- Perform a site-wide audit because Google might not list every violating product in your account diagnostics. Check similar items to identify issues.
- Verify your website is globally accessible to Google crawlers.
- Fix the data in your feed, landing page, and microdata to ensure they all align.
Step 3 of 3: Request a Review
- Once you have corrected your data, re-upload or re-fetch your product feed to alert Google to the changes. Then, allow 24 to 72 hours for the automatic re-crawl to complete.
- If the issue persists or you believe the flagging is incorrect, locate the item in the Needs Attention tab. Select I disagree with the issue or Request Review if available. Manual reviews can take up to seven business days.
Try our guided data source setup troubleshooter for help fixing issues with creating, formatting or uploading your data source (for text, tab-delimited or XML file data source only), and fixing warnings or disapprovals related to price.
In order to stay compliant, we recommend following the guidance on the help center articles below:
- How to fix: Mismatched product price
- How to fix: Mismatched product availability
- How to fix: Regional availability values are inconsistent
- How to fix: Mismatched regional availability
- How to fix: Inaccurate price status due to inconsistency between data source and landing page
- Request a review of your issues
If you’re uncertain about the issue or don’t know how to proceed, you can contact the support team.
Unsupported destination based on regional settings
This is an item-level warning that indicates you’re targeting some serving destinations that aren’t supported for regional offers. Your offers will still continue to serve everywhere regional offers are supported.