ShieldKit
Free check
Menu
All platforms

BigCommerce

Google Merchant Center problems on BigCommerce

The store check reads your storefront. Fixes come with steps to paste into your store’s pages.

Check my store freeCreate a free account

How to start

Run the free store check, or create a ShieldKit account and add your store. The first full store check (up to 11 checks) is free.

The free check on the website runs 7 of the 11 checks, with no account and nothing to install.

How fixes work

  • Every problem comes with plain-English fix steps.
  • With Recovery, we write your refund and shipping policies from your answers, and draft your privacy policy and terms. You paste each one into your store’s page editor, with steps for where it goes.
  • BigCommerce gives each storefront page its own address, so a new policy page is one Google can open.

Prices and hidden problems

  • Price Watch checks the prices on your product pages on BigCommerce: the price Google reads against the price shoppers see, and strikethrough prices that aren’t a real discount.
  • With Google Merchant Center connected, it also compares each product with Google’s own price.
  • Free shows how many products are affected; Monitoring and Recovery list each one.
  • With Recovery, the deep check looks for causes a quick look misses: template text left on a page, social links that go to the theme maker, trust claims with nothing to back them up, urgency pop-ups and broken menu links.

You can also connect your Google Merchant Center account, read-only, to see Google’s own issues next to the store check.

8 of the 11 checks on BigCommerce

Your storefront, policies and contact details are read from the site itself. Product data and product images need a product list, and BigCommerce publishes none ShieldKit can read, so they come back Not checked. Business identity runs once you connect your Merchant Center account.

  • RefundIn the free check
  • ShippingIn the free check
  • Privacy and termsIn the free check
  • Contact detailsIn the free check
  • Product dataNot checked here: it needs a product list.
  • Hidden fees
  • Google product listingsIn the free check
  • Business identityNot checked here: it needs your Merchant Center account connected.
  • Storefront accessIn the free check
  • Payment displayIn the free check
  • Product imagesNot checked here: it needs a product list.

Merchant Center

How a BigCommerce store gets its products to Google

BigCommerce’s own position changed here, and it matters: its help centre says the legacy Google Ads and Listings app for BigCommerce is no longer available, and recommends Feedonomics Surface to connect a store to Google Shopping. So the connection is a product-data service rather than a channel inside your store admin, and what Google sees is whatever that service sends it.

  1. 1

    Connect through the service BigCommerce now recommends, or send the products yourself: Merchant Center can fetch a file from an address on a schedule.

  2. 2

    Write down which one owns your product data. A store that moved off the retired app with its old feed still scheduled ends up with two sources for the same products.

  3. 3

    Whichever route you take, each product’s address in the feed has to be a page Google can open and a shopper can buy from.

Fixing it here

What usually goes wrong on BigCommerce

  • The page and the feed have to agree

    Because your product data reaches Google through a service rather than your store, the usual problem is drift: a price, a stock state or a title that changed in BigCommerce and not in what Google was sent. Check when the feed last updated before you change anything else.

    How to fix a feed that does not match your site

  • Price mismatches start with what the page shows

    Google reads the price it was sent against the price on the page it opens. Currency switchers, customer-group pricing and scheduled sales all change the page without changing the feed.

    How to fix a price mismatch

  • Policy pages, and the footer that links them

    Add a page per policy in your storefront’s pages, publish it, and link each in your footer. Google reads the pages a shopper can reach, so an unlinked page helps nobody.

    How to fix a missing refund policy

  • The business details on the account

    Your store’s name, address and contact details are read against the ones on your Merchant Center account. Keep the same wording in both, not just the same company.

    How to fix mismatched business information

Other platforms