Google Merchant Center: What to Set Up, What Affects Sales

An online store needs six things in Google Merchant Center: business details, a verified and claimed website, shipping settings, a return policy, a product data source and a link to Google Ads. After setup, two kinds of status affect sales: product issues limit or remove individual products, and account issues can remove all of them. Check both every week on the Needs attention tab. In our data, the most common issue in a sample of affected products is “not eligible in any campaign”, which you fix in Google Ads.

Merchant Center holds the product data that Google shows in Shopping ads and free listings. It is one stage on the way from your store to an ad. What goes into each product’s data is a question of feed optimisation. Whether a product gets impressions is a question for Google Ads. This guide covers the account itself: what to set up, which statuses to read and which reports to open.

What does Google Merchant Center do for an online store?

Merchant Center is where Google gets your product data. According to Google Search Central (Share your product data with Google), products can appear in Google Search results without an upload to Merchant Center. Some surfaces, such as listings on the Google Shopping tab, require it.

The same product data serves two programmes. Shopping ads run through a linked Google Ads account. Free listings are unpaid placements of the same products. Merchant Center keeps the two apart in its performance data: you can split clicks and impressions by marketing method, ads or organic (Performance reports in the Merchant API documentation).

Google’s Product data specification explains why the data matters. Google uses it to match your products to searches. Incorrect, inaccurate or missing data can lead to disapprovals, limited eligibility or products that show incorrectly.

Is Merchant Center Next a different product?

No. Merchant Center Next is the name Google used for the new version of Merchant Center. In 2024, Google’s Help Center had a separate section under that name (Show your products for free on Google, archived July 2024). Older guides still use old names: the Needs attention tab, for example, used to be called Diagnostics (Needs attention tab). The paths in this guide follow the current Help Center.

What do you need to set up before products can show?

Six settings, in this order. Each step names the place in Merchant Center and what to check before you move on.

1. Business information. Go to Settings → Business info → Edit business details. Enter the business name, the address and customer service contacts: a working page on your site with contact details, an email address on your own domain and a valid phone number (Add your business information). For the address, Google asks for the place where the business is registered.
2. Website verification and claim. Verifying tells Google you own the site. Claiming links the address to your Merchant Center account and reserves it for that account. Google lists five ways to verify: through your e-commerce platform, by email, with an HTML tag or file, through Google Tag Manager or through Google Analytics (About online store URL verification). In most cases you do it once.
3. Shipping. The Product data specification requires shipping costs for Shopping ads and free listings in 21 countries, including Czechia, Poland, Germany, the UK and the US. Set them in the account’s shipping settings, or per product with the shipping attribute.
4. Return policy. Your site has to state it clearly: Google’s Misrepresentation policy counts an unclear, missing or hard-to-find return policy as a violation. Adding it to Merchant Center is optional, and Google may then show it on your ads and listings. Go to Products & store → Shipping and returns → Return policies → Add return policy (Set up your return policies for Shopping ads and free listings). The policy must match your website, cover ordinary returns and not only faulty goods, and open without a login.
5. A product data source. This is your product feed: a file, a spreadsheet, an API connection or products Google collects from structured data, the product markup in your page code (Manage your data sources). Every product needs an ID, title, description, link, image link, availability and price. Products sold as new also need a brand, except films, books and music. If the manufacturer assigned a GTIN (the barcode number), Google strongly recommends adding it; if not, the product needs an MPN (the manufacturer part number). The specification says a product without a required attribute can’t serve in ads or free listings.
6. A link to Google Ads. Go to Settings → Access and services → Apps and services → Add service (Link a Google Ads account to Merchant Center). Before you link them, Google asks that both accounts are free of account-level policy violations. If you create a new Google Ads account in this step, you can’t change its time zone or currency later.

When you upload products for the first time, Google runs an initial review (Issues in Merchant Center). Before it starts, the account needs shipping settings where shipping is required, a feed created for the target country, a claimed and verified website and a verified business address. In the US, the account also needs tax settings. The review can take 3–5 business days for Shopping ads. Products stay “Pending” until the review ends, and further changes to the data or the site can delay it.

How do products get into Merchant Center and stay accurate?

You can use one data source or several, with the same or different upload methods. If a product arrives through two sources, Merchant Center counts it as part of the one that updated it most recently. When that source stops sending the product, Merchant Center deletes it.

The right method depends on the site. For smaller sites that change rarely, Google Search Central suggests an automated feed built from crawled pages. For larger sites or frequent changes, it suggests uploading feed files on a schedule. Crawling may miss some products, and Google gives no guarantee on how fast it processes crawled changes.

To change product attributes without touching your store’s export, Merchant Center has attribute rules. They need the “Advanced data source management” add-on and can, for example, put the brand in front of a title (Set up your attribute rules). A rule can take values from the primary data source or from a supplemental feed.

If a plugin or script sends your products through an API, check which API it uses. According to the Content API documentation (Deprecation and sunset), Google sunset the Content API for Shopping on 18 August 2026. Since 1 September 2026, its requests have been failing progressively, and all endpoints will shut down in early 2027. The Merchant API replaces it. We list what breaks after the Content API shutdown and how to check your tools.

Two more rules keep the data stable:

• Upload a new data source before you delete the old one. When you move to a new platform or feed tool, this order lets item IDs and their history move to the new source (Manage your data sources). Deleted product data can take up to an hour to disappear from ads and free listings.
• Let Merchant Center correct prices and stock, but keep uploading. Automatic updates read price, sale price, availability and condition from the structured data on your product pages (Allow Merchant Center to update product information automatically). They are on by default. Google describes them as a fix for temporary mismatches on a small share of products, not a replacement for regular feed updates.

Which Merchant Center statuses affect sales?

Google splits issues into two levels (Issues in Merchant Center). A product-level issue affects only the product it sits on. An account-level issue affects every product in the account.

A disapproved product stops showing across Google until you fix its issue. The share of approved products is your approval rate. The portal treats 95% approved or more as healthy, 85–95% as a warning and less than 85% as an error.

You find product issues on the Needs attention tab: Products & store → Products → Needs attention. The “Prioritized fixes” toggle limits the list to issues with a medium or high impact on performance. The Issue Details Page shows the business impact of each issue, including lost click potential, and lets you download the full list of affected products. Account issues appear in a banner at the top of the account and under “View setup and policy issues” on the same tab.

Account warnings come with examples and a warning period. If you don’t request a review during that period, Google reviews the account again at its end. That review can take up to 7 days, and any unresolved issue leads to a suspension. Some serious issues, which Google calls egregious, get no warning at all, and Google suspends the account immediately. Misrepresentation is one of them, and to detect it Google may check your website, your other accounts and third-party sources (Misrepresentation). Where to start depends on which account issue you have, and our guide to Merchant Center suspensions helps you tell them apart.

You can also set some statuses yourself. The pause attribute stops a product in ads for up to 14 days; after that, Google disapproves it. Google’s specification asks you not to set availability to out_of_stock as a way to pause a product.

The most common product issues in our data are campaign and stock decisions

We looked at product issues across the store catalogues in our data. Google reports them for products from the linked Merchant Center accounts through the Google Ads API (shopping_product), so they include issues on the Google Ads side too. These are observations, not an experiment (GetProfit data, 142 stores, fact bank compiled in August 2026).

Issues sit in a few catalogues. Of the 5,744,507 products, 55.9% have at least one issue. Yet the median store has issues on 0.0% of its catalogue, and 109 of 142 stores have issues on less than 1% of their catalogue. A few very large catalogues carry most of the issues.

The two most common issues come from campaigns and stock. Here are the top five in a sample of 400,000 products with issues. The sample isn’t random, so a few catalogues may dominate it. One product can carry several issues, so the counts add up to more than 400,000.

In the same sample, classic data errors numbered only in the hundreds: a missing required attribute on 785 products, an image that is too small on 163. The first issue in the table means that no campaign in Google Ads serves the product, so you fix it there, not in the feed. The third one means the account has no shipping set for a country it targets, which blocks products in countries where shipping costs are required. Our study of Merchant Center errors has the full breakdown and looks at whether fixing issues moves revenue.

A clean status doesn’t mean impressions. In our study of 1.4 million products across 130+ stores over 13 months, 55.0% of products received no ad budget at all. A separate guide on why most products get no impressions looks at which of them are worth bringing into ads.

A worked example: 450 approved products outside every campaign

Example store, not client data.

A tableware store sends 3,000 products to Merchant Center. Of these, 100 are out of stock and 50 are disapproved, so 2,850 products, 95.0%, are approved and can serve. The portal treats 95% approved or more as healthy, so this catalogue passes.

Yet 450 approved products carry “not eligible in any campaign”, because one brand sits in an excluded product group. That is 15% of the catalogue and three times the 150 products with stock or data issues. The approval rate misses all of it.

Which Merchant Center reports are worth opening?

Merchant Center has more reports than a store owner reads every week. These six answer questions that affect sales.

Google describes the first two rows in Issues in Merchant Center and Manage your data sources, and the other four in three Merchant API guides: Performance reports, Understand the market and Explore your competitive landscape. Only accounts that meet Google’s minimum eligibility requirements get best sellers, price competitiveness and competitive visibility. We explain how to read the competitive visibility report in a separate guide.

If a report is missing for you, check your access level. According to Google (Manage people and access levels in Merchant Center), people with Standard access can’t work with reports, view performance insights or link Google Ads accounts.

Merchant Center reports show one issue or one product at a time. The portal’s feed section reads the same Merchant Center data and adds up the whole catalogue. It shows how many products have each of nine fields empty, which products are priced above the market, and which stores in your niche show above you. It also turns the nine fields into a feed score graded from A to F.

How do you keep a Merchant Center account out of suspension?

We keep a two-stage Merchant Center checklist, built from real account reinstatement cases (version of 26 August 2026). Stage one takes about a day, and in most of those cases the problem ends there. Stage two is for accounts that stay restricted after it.

After stage one, wait 2–3 days so Google can crawl the new version of the site. Then send one review request that lists what you changed. Google warns that there may be a limit on the number of reviews you can request (Issues in Merchant Center). So after a rejected review, move on to stage two instead of sending another request.

One mismatch in stage two is easy to miss. Some export plugins send the price before a discount instead of the current one. This affects only discounted products, so a spot check can miss all of them. A counterfeit goods issue is a separate case. It is about the goods, not the website, so the appeal needs distribution contracts, invoices or delivery notes for the brands you sell.

What to check in Merchant Center every week

1. Open Needs attention with “Prioritized fixes” on. Download the affected products for each issue with a medium or high impact, and fix those first.
2. Look for an account-level banner. A warning has a deadline, so deal with it before anything else.
3. Compare four counts. Products on your site, products in the data source, approved products, and approved products that no campaign serves. The largest gap shows where to work. If the gaps are large, run a full product feed audit.
4. Check out-of-stock products against the site. Availability should match what a shopper can buy. To stop a product for a short time, use the pause attribute for up to 14 days, not out_of_stock.
5. Read price and availability mismatches. Keep automatic updates on, and still send fresh feed data on schedule.

Two more checks run on their own schedule:

• Before any platform or feed tool change, upload the new data source first, then delete the old one.
• Once a month, open best sellers, price competitiveness and competitive visibility, if your account has them.

Once the basics hold, move on to Merchant Center add-ons such as promotions, and to star ratings in Shopping ads.

See what Google doesn’t see in your catalogue. Sign in with Google in one click — both Google Ads and Merchant Center. We change nothing, neither in your account nor in the feed, without your consent.

Check your feed →

Sources

• Issues in Merchant Center — Google Merchant Center Help: product-level warnings and disapprovals, preemptive item disapproval, account warnings and suspensions, review times (up to 7 days; 3–5 business days for the initial review), initial review requirements, the Needs attention tab, Prioritized fixes, the Issue Details Page, a possible limit on review requests. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Add your business information — Google Merchant Center Help: business name, address and customer service fields and where to enter them. Checked 2 October 2026.
• About online store URL verification — Google Merchant Center Help: what verify and claim mean; five verification methods. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Product data specification — Google Merchant Center Help: required attributes, brand, GTIN and MPN rules, the 21 countries where shipping costs are required, the pause attribute and the 14-day limit, why product data matters. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Set up your return policies for Shopping ads and free listings — Google Merchant Center Help: adding a return policy is optional and Google may show it on ads and listings; where to add it and the requirements for it. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Manage your data sources — Google Merchant Center Help: one or several data sources, which source owns a product, replacing a data source, up to an hour for deletions, the product file issue report with line numbers. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Link a Google Ads account to Merchant Center — Google Merchant Center Help: the linking path, no account-level policy violations before linking, time zone and currency of a new Google Ads account. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Set up your attribute rules — Google Merchant Center Help: attribute rules, the Advanced data source management add-on, values from primary or supplemental sources. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Allow Merchant Center to update product information automatically — Google Merchant Center Help: automatic updates for price, sale price, availability and condition; on by default; not a replacement for regular updates. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Misrepresentation — Google Merchant Center Help: an unclear, missing or hard-to-find return policy isn’t allowed; an egregious violation, suspension on detection without warning, information from multiple sources. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Manage people and access levels in Merchant Center — Google Merchant Center Help: what Standard access can’t do. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Needs attention tab — Google Merchant Center Help glossary: the Needs attention tab was formerly called Diagnostics. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Show your products for free on Google — Google Merchant Center Help, archived copy of July 2024: the Help Center section named Merchant Center Next. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Share your product data with Google — Google Search Central: Merchant Center is required for the Shopping tab but not for Search results; automated feeds for smaller sites, feed files for larger ones. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Deprecation and sunset — Content API for Shopping documentation: sunset on 18 August 2026, progressive errors from 1 September 2026, shutdown in early 2027, replaced by the Merchant API. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Performance reports — Merchant API documentation: clicks and impressions per product, segmented by marketing method (ads, organic). Checked 2 October 2026.
• Understand the market — Merchant API documentation: best sellers and price competitiveness reports, minimum eligibility requirements. Checked 2 October 2026.
• Explore your competitive landscape — Merchant API documentation: the competitive visibility report, page overlap and higher position rates, eligibility requirements. Checked 2 October 2026.
• shopping_product — Google Ads API reference: products from linked Merchant Center accounts and the issues affecting whether they can show in ads. Checked 2 October 2026.
• GetProfit data: catalogues of 142 stores, fact bank compiled in August 2026 — share of products and of each store’s catalogue with at least one product issue; the most common issues in a sample of 400,000 products with issues.
• GetProfit study of 1,404,808 products, 130+ stores, 13 months — share of products that received no ad budget.
• GetProfit Merchant Center checklist, version of 26 August 2026, built from account reinstatement cases — the two-stage account check.