The flag was about the shop. Most of the fixes were about everything around it.
When Google Merchant Center flags an online shop for misrepresentation, the instinct is to open the product feed and start inspecting items. It is a reasonable instinct. In our recent audit of a retail site, it was not where most of the work turned out to be.
What we audited
The audit produced twelve fix items. They fell naturally into six groups.
The first group is who you are. Business details went onto the contact page and the footer, and into the structured data that search engines read. The opening hours in that structured data were corrected so that they matched reality.
The second is what you promise. A privacy policy and terms and conditions were drafted and published. The shipping policy was rewritten. The returns policy gained something small and important: how long a refund actually takes.
The third is what you sell. Products without barcodes were marked as having no product identifier, instead of leaving the question open. An old lookbook section was unpublished and its links redirected, so that nobody lands on a page for something the shop no longer presents.
The fourth is what the platform already knows about you. The policies held in Merchant Center had drifted from the website: Merchant Center said returns were accepted at any time while the returns page said 30 days, and delivery was set to take zero days, on Los Angeles time. Both were corrected, the business details were updated to match the site, and the products were synced again.
The fifth is where you deliver. Shipping was reviewed and a new zone added to cover three more provinces.
The sixth is housekeeping. Old fulfilled orders were marked complete, so that the shop’s records told a consistent story.
Why it reads as trust
A platform that sends strangers to your checkout needs to believe three things: that the business exists, that it will do what it says, and that the page a shopper lands on matches the listing that sent them there.
We cannot see inside Google’s decisions, and platforms rarely point at a single cause, so we will not pretend to. But every item above is a place where a shopper, or a reviewer, could have found a gap between what the shop claimed and what the site said. Closing those gaps is good practice whether or not a platform is watching.
The part only the owner can supply
Policy pages describe how a business really works, which means they cannot be written from the outside. Is the business’s trading status stated correctly? Can sale items be returned? How should damage be reported? Only the owner knows. The audit moved forward once those answers were in, and we applied them across the policies so that each page said the same thing.
What the pages could not fix
At the time of writing, the flag is still on, and what is holding it up is no longer on the website.
Before it would review the flag, Google asked the business owner to verify their identity, using a payments profile and documents in the business’s legal name. An earlier attempt had already failed before we took over the account, and we do not know who started it or why it was turned down. Since then the process has been stuck: for the owner and for us, on different computers and browsers, the verification page reloads without ever opening the upload screen. The case is with Google’s support team, and we are waiting on them.
Two things are worth doing before a flag ever appears. Know which Merchant Center account holds your website, and make sure you are an administrator on it with a login you control. And when Google asks for identity verification, do it yourself, once, with documents that match your legal name exactly. A failed first attempt has proved far harder to undo than any page on the site.
A quick self-check for your own shop
Four questions tend to find the first problem.
- Can a stranger find your business name, contact details and opening hours in three places, and do they all match?
- Does your shipping page describe where you deliver today, not where you delivered two years ago?
- Does your returns page say how long a refund takes?
- Is there anything in your catalogue that you no longer sell but that still has a page?
They will not replace an audit. Policy wording should always reflect how your own business runs, so treat them as prompts, not templates.
If Google has flagged your online shop and you would like a second pair of eyes on it, tell us about the shop.
