Shopify
Google Merchant Center problems on Shopify
The ShieldKit app from the Shopify App Store. With Recovery, add refund, shipping and contact policies in one click, with undo.
How to start
Install ShieldKit from the Shopify App Store. Your first store check (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, ShieldKit writes your refund and shipping policies from your answers and adds them, and your contact policy, to Shopify when you click Apply. You can undo it.
- Your privacy policy and terms come as drafts to copy into Shopify’s policy settings.
- You pay through your Shopify bill.
Prices and hidden problems
- Price Watch compares the price on each product page with your Shopify prices, and flags strikethrough prices that aren’t a real discount.
- With Google Merchant Center connected, Monitoring and Recovery also see the price problems Google reports.
- 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.
All 11 checks on Shopify
Because ShieldKit runs inside your Shopify admin, it reads your product list and your store details directly, so all 11 checks have what they need.
- RefundIn the free check
- ShippingIn the free check
- Privacy and termsIn the free check
- Contact detailsIn the free check
- Product data
- Hidden fees
- Google product listingsIn the free check
- Business identity
- Storefront accessIn the free check
- Payment displayIn the free check
- Product images
Merchant Center
How a Shopify store gets its products to Google
Shopify’s own route is the Google & YouTube channel, which Google manages and you add from the Shopify App Store. Shopify says it syncs your products and information about your store to Merchant Center for you, so there is no feed file to host and no fetch schedule to watch.
- 1
Add the Google & YouTube channel in your Shopify admin, then sign in with the Google account that owns your Merchant Center account.
- 2
Choose which Shopify fields Google reads. After that, an edit to a product in Shopify reaches Google without a second step.
- 3
If that Merchant Center account already holds a feed of its own, read Shopify’s notes on connecting an existing account first. Two sources sending the same products is a mismatch waiting to happen.
Fixing it here
What usually goes wrong on Shopify
Your policies are settings, not pages
Shopify keeps them in Settings → Policies and publishes each at its own address, such as /policies/refund-policy. Most themes link them in the footer; if yours doesn’t, add them to your footer menu. A policy a shopper can’t reach from your storefront reads as a missing one.
How to fix a missing refund policyProduct identifiers come from fields you may not have filled
Shopify sends each variant’s Barcode field as the GTIN, and the product’s Vendor field as the brand unless you set one in the Google & YouTube app. The standard product form has no MPN or condition field at all: both are set in that app.
How to fix a missing GTINHandmade and custom products need telling
For products with no manufacturer identifier, the Google & YouTube app has a “This is a custom product” checkbox. Without it, Google keeps expecting a GTIN, MPN and brand that don’t exist.
How to tell Google a product has no identifierA price that differs from the feed is usually an app
Check Discounts for automatic discounts, and your installed apps for member pricing, bulk discounts or price scripts. For more than one currency, Shopify’s own Markets is steadier than a third-party converter.
How to fix a price mismatch