Dreaded Google Website Needs Improvement issue

[ShapeTheMetal]

Hi All,

I am literally at my wits end. We recently launched our site on Shopify (https://shapethemetal.com ) and not long after, got pinged with the dreaded "Website Needs Improvement" Google Marketplace suspension.

As seems to be the norm, Google has been extremely unhelpful in this regard. I find it disgusting that they get away with what they do here whereby they know full well what the issue(s) are with your site, but refuse to disclose them, instead providing a myriad of possible reasons as to why your site may be blocked, but not identifying any specific reason meaning that you can go and make changes to your site in the hope that you are correcting an issue but in fact go backwards and possibly create more issues without knowing.

I have read their policies forwards, backwards, up, down, left and right and am going cross-eyed with the process. Yes, we are using a free theme, but aside from that, the site appears to have all the required items -

There is no placeholder text

There are no placeholder images

There are no 404's or redirects (except for the standard redirect from http to https for obvious reasons)

All our policies are visible and tailored to our business

All contact details are available (phone number, email, physical address)

All pricing is available

Checkout works

Etc etc etc

I could on and on, as far as I can see, we tick all of the boxes they mention in the notification email and also all of the ones that you find once you start digging deeper into individual policies. I have even worked through the checklists / links etc from the likes of EmmanuelFlossie who has posted useful information on this topic.

Surely there must be a way to actually get in touch with someone at Google to fix this issue??? This is a paid service for which people spend thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on, yet to date the only responses from Google are automaton responses that raise more questions than resolutions.

Now obviously there is an issue that they see, one which I am more than happy to fix, but I have no idea what it is they want fixed. How do we move forward from here?  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Ben / Shape The Metal.

[ShapeTheMetal]

Well, we made some minor changes to the site in the hope that the issue was corrected. The problem is, google provides no specific details as to what the issue(s) may be so we are only guessing at present. When looking at the email they send us, the links on the merchant center, the links provided by Emmanuel etc, we comply with all the requirements so we are making changes in a vacuum and potentially making things worse rather than better.

We re-submitted for a review again the other day but it came back negative overnight so it is back to square one, with no idea on how to resolve this issue.

Does anyone know a way to short-circuit the Google phone support service so you can actually speak to a live person to try and resolve these issues?

[ShapeTheMetal]

Another week, another failed review and another week of waiting for the cooling off period. 

I have resorted to opening multiple cases a day with Google and also cc'ing in other people at Google in the hope that I can eventually get a human response from somebody that will shed some light on the issue. So far, numerous reviews of the site have been performed and the thought is that it is compliant with every policy they have published, so a lot of head-scratching as to why this is happening.