To ensure the success of your products and 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. Follow the error message to resolve each error.
Price and availability mismatch
Price or availability mismatches occur when the information in your product data source differs from the price on your landing page or the structured data.
Common causes and resolutions
- Inconsistent data: Ensure that the price attribute in your product data, the price on your landing page and the price in your structured data (for example Schema.org) are all identical. For sales, use the sale price
[sale_price]attribute and ensure that it's reflected on the landing page. For subscriptions, use the Subscription cost[subscription_cost]attribute and clearly state the terms. Also, confirm that the currency is consistent across your data source, landing page and structured data for your target country. - Website microdata: Ensure that the offer and price properties in your Schema.org markup (JSON-LD or microdata) match the price in your data source and the visual price on your landing page. Use the rich results test tool to verify your website's structured data.
- Delayed updates: To reduce delays, schedule your data source uploads through the 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 data source data. Use the 'Undo edits' feature to sync your account with the data source again.
- Caching issues: Clear your website cache to ensure that Google's crawlers find your most current pricing data.
- Automatic item updates: In the Merchant Center to allow Google to automatically correct minor price or availability discrepancies.
- Sale pricing: When offering sale prices, always include the 'sale_price_effective_date' attribute in your data source to ensure that the sale period is correctly synchronised.
- Platform-specific issues (Shopify): If you use Shopify, try toggling the sync off and back on to force a re-sync of your product data.
Regional-specific causes
- IP geolocation: Don't use IP geolocation to automatically change prices on your landing page, as Google crawlers may not find 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 and shop
in the left navigation menu.
- Select the Needs attention tab on the Products page.
- Look for issue titles like 'Mismatched price', 'Mismatched availability' or their regional counterparts.
- Select View samples to view 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 that your website is globally accessible to Google crawlers and that product URLs lead directly to the product page without redirects.
- Fix the data in your data source, landing page and microdata to ensure that they all align. Use Google's rich results test to validate your structured data.
Step 3 of 3: Request a review
- Correct your data, then re-upload your product data source to alert Google to the changes. After re-uploading, you can navigate to Products > Diagnostics, and request a manual review for the affected products.
- An automatic re-crawl will occur, which typically takes 24 to 72 hours. Manual reviews can take up to seven working days. If you use a third-party app to manage your data source, ensure that it has re-synced correctly or contact their support if discrepancies continue.
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 disapproval related to price.
Stay compliant by following the Help Centre 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 issues persist, contact the support team.
Unsupported destination based on regional settings
This is an item-level warning that indicates that you're targeting some serving destinations that don't support regional offers. Your offers will continue to serve where regional offers are supported.
Frequently asked questions
What happens when multiple regions targeting the same location (for example, two identical state/province regions) are created in the Merchant Center account?
There won't be any error or warning messages. During serving, one will be selected to provide an optimal shopper experience, generally showing the best price and availability.
Should the region ID be honoured for the mobile customer journey?
Yes, you should honour the region ID.
I'm encountering the error 'Too many regional overrides'. What should I do?
Contact us and include a screenshot of the error in your email to the support team.
I'm encountering the error 'Over capacity'. What should I do?
Contact us and include a screenshot of the error in your email to the support team.
When an item is disapproved due to 'Mismatched regional pricing', is the product disapproved only in regions where the mismatch was found or is it fully disapproved and not served at all?
The item won't be served in any region.
The Regions tab isn't showing in Merchant Center. What's wrong?
You need to participate in Shopping ads or cost-free listings in Merchant Center for the Regions tab to show.
My regional products have been under review for too long.
Ensure that you've chosen the correct destination for the regional data source, which is Shopping ads, cost-free listings or both.
Where should I add regional installation fees?
If the regional installation fee is required, add the fee to the item delivery cost. If the fee isn't required, you don't need to provide the information. Ensure that you don't have the installation fee auto-selected on the landing page.
The item is showing as 'Out of stock' on the landing page, although the availability in the regional data source is 'In stock'. What's wrong?
If the clickthrough doesn't have a region ID appended, it means that there's a national 'OOS' data source value being used for the click. If you find the region ID appended to the URL, contact us.
Is microdata required for RAAP?
No, it isn't required, but microdata offers great value when it's kept up to date.
Can there be more than one regional data source?
Yes; however, if the two data sources don't share the information for the same item, information from both will be combined. Meanwhile, if two data sources share a subset of overrides for the same item, the info from the last data source will take precedence.
Is RAAP supported at the MCA level?
At this time, RAAP settings are supported at the sub-account level only.