Shopify Markets Google Merchant Centre Pricing Error

[JamesParry95]

Hi everyone, 

Is anyone else getting continuous pricing errors from Google Merchant centre when looking at a Shopify market store?

Essentially, we have HairMax.co.uk as our primary domain, and Google merchant centre has been set up correctly here.

We are using Simprosys for Google Merchant Centre and ad account integration which is producing us localised feeds to add into Google Merchant Centre.

So Merchant Centre is reviewing these products and many are going through OK, but lots are coming back with pricing errors.

So we have HairMax.It and that has it's own XML feed URL generated by Simprosy which plugs into Google Merchant Centre:

https://gsf-gmc-xml-feeds.simpshopifyapps.com/try-hairmax-snTrL0R5ZU/407/catalog1.xml

Our first issue is that the URL in the XML has URL parameters and when that's clicked it auto redirects to our primary domain which is the UK store. 

So if you search Actonis in the XML feed, this is the link for Actonis:
https://hairmax.it/products/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb-eu?currency=EUR&variant=53599978520949&...

But if you cut off the URL parameters and just search the base URL, it directs to the IT store:
https://hairmax.it/products/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb-eu

This is leaving me to believe that users and the crawl bot used by Google is scraping our UK store rather than the EU store and coming back with pricing errors. Saying that our Merchant Centre price is 299.95 EUR and our url link for the product gives us £299.95

It's worth noting that in our store we have a UK and an EU SKU set-up, because we have two different warehouses. So all our products are duplicated and have unique SKUs, URLs, collections etc. So on the EU stores we only show the SKUs relevant to EU territory and vice versa in the UK

In order to set this up we had to get a Shopify 2.0 theme set-up, we are now using Concept theme.

We are using PageFly for our product templates.

Going down other rabit holes, I realised we may be lacking the JSON-LD schema used by Google's crawl bot, so I installed SEO Ant, which worked great for auto generating our JSON schema. However, I realised that it only generated it for our primary domain, so I cancelled this running as it would give our EU products a GBP currency.

I then went a step further and created my own schema markup! This is coming from someone who started a career in finance then marketing lol.

By the way, this script works excellently for enriching your store with the rich snippets, if just using a primary domain. I tried using Shopify liquid elements in the script but they won't render in the schema so you have to hard code the variables.

<script type="application/ld+json">

  [

{

"@context": "http://schema.org",

"@type": "Product",

"@id": "https:\/\/hairmax.co.uk\/products\/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb#product",

"brand": {

"@type": "Brand",

"name": "HairMax"

},

"url": "https://hairmax.co.uk/products/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb",

"name": "ACTONIS™ 18 DUAL ACTION LASERCOMB",

"image": "https://hairmax.co.uk/cdn/shop/files/Actonis-18-LaserComb-right-gray-lit_1440x_jpg.webp",

"description": "Actonis™ Dual Action 18 LaserComb - Revolutionary Hair Regrowth Technology\nExperience clinically pro",

"sku": "HMXACT18RG",

"weight": "0g",

"offers": [{

"@type": "Offer" ,

"priceCurrency": "EUR",

"priceValidUntil": "2025-01-23",

"price" : "299.95" ,

"availability" : "http://schema.org/InStock" ,

"itemCondition": "http://schema.org/NewCondition",

"sku": "HMXACT18RG",

"name": "Default Title",

"url" : "https://hairmax.co.uk/products/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb?variant=53599972491637",

"seller" : {

"@type" : "Organization",

"name" : "HairMax"

},

"mpn": "00856823006695"

}

]

}

,

{

"@context": "http://schema.org",

"@type": "BreadcrumbList",

"itemListElement": [

{

"@type": "ListItem",

"position": 1,

"item": {

"@type": "Website",

"@id": "https://hairmax.co.uk",

"name": "HairMax home"

}

},

{

"@type": "ListItem",

"position": 2,

"item": {

"@type": "WebPage",

"@id": "https://hairmax.co.uk/products/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb",

"name": "ACTONIS™ 18 DUAL ACTION LASERCOMB"

}

}

]

}

]

</script>

Here are the results when pasting this URL 

"https://hairmax.it/products/actonis-18-dual-action-lasercomb-eu" into https://validator.schema.org/ which as far as I am aware uses a similar logic to the Merchant centre crawl bot:

So basically it is reading that the product is in EUR and has a price of 299.95 yet it still doesn't pull back the correct price... I realise that the URL in the schema is .co.uk but we only have one EU product page and it needs to be relevant for our hairmax.it, hairmaxfrance.com, hairmax.de domains etc

I have already raised a ticket with Google and this is there response:

"Hi James,

Thank you for getting back to Google Ads support. We appreciate your prompt response.

I understand your concern regarding the issues on your Merchant Center account: Mismatched Product Price. We appreciate the screenshot shared.

Post checking, Google found a mismatch between the prices in your product data and the prices on the landing pages of your online store. I have checked a sample Product ID: shopify_GB_9528050778422_49406393909558

• Original price on the feed: €29.95
• Price on raw feed: €29.95
• Price picked by crawlers: 22.95
• Price on the landing page: 22.95 GBP 

I have noticed that the price seems to change depending on the IP detection, which may be causing the product price mismatch on the landing page.

You may address this issue by:

1. Ensuring the prices are matching on all the platforms (feed, landing page, micro data). 
2. If you want to change the landing feed and micro data, please get in touch with your web developer to rectify the issue. 
3. Review the How to fix: Mismatched Product Price and make changes to your Merchant Center and/or online store.
4.  Don’t change the price of your product on your landing page based on a user’s location. Additionally, do not change price based on cookies, browsers, devices, or any other factor. 
5. If Italy is your target country, make sure the prices on your website are set specifically for Italy. You may also want to add a feature in the country settings on your website that adjusts the prices based on the user's location when they select a different country.

Once the necessary changes have been made and if you believe your Google Merchant Center account complies with our Shopping policies and you are confident the necessary changes have been made, you may request a review by following the steps below:

1. Please click Products on the navigation menu.
2. Click the Funnel icon to Show Filtering Options.
3. Choose Product ID then, put the item ID you want to request a review.
4. Click the Title.
5. Click the Needs attention tab.
6. Click I disagree with the issue.
7. The review may take 7 business days to get the result.

If you have further questions, you may reply to this email or contact us here and we will be happy to assist you. 

Thank you for choosing Google Ads support. We appreciate your relationship with us. 

Sincerely,
Kate
gTech Customer Experience   

NB: If you need to reference this support ticket in the future, the ID number is 0-0246000037929"

I feel like this should be a straight forward resolution with Shopify markets and Google merchant centre but I would say I have already invested circa 50 hours to solving this and absolutely nowhere nearer.

Please can anyone help? I will surely post a walkthrough article about this when resolved 🙏

Thanks you and good night.

Regards
James

P.S. I have already requested a manual review numerous times and seems to generate wins occasionally but sometimes dissaproves already approved products and certain products just hit a brick wall with

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Your first task is to ensure you remove the redirects, all URLs you submit, must be the final destination. Otherwise you are at risk of a suspension.

Also ensure the product URL contains the parameter ?currency=EUR

Otherwise Google will not pull the correct price (again the final URL, you can not submit redirected urls).

Once you have done that, check if Google sees the correct price.

[JamesParry95]

Thanks for helping @EmmanuelFlossie 

Here's the thing, we have switched off redirects on our store

If you type in https://hairmax.es/products/laserband-41-comfortflex-eu it will stay on the hairmax.es domain

But we you type in https://hairmax.es/products/laserband-41-comfortflex-eu?currency=EUR&variant=49406249042230, which is the default format for merchant feed from Simprosys (I can't remove any more parameters) it redirects do our .co.uk domain

We've tried to switch redirect off on store, do you know any other way to do this?

Thanks

James

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Most likely you have an app, or theme script that is doing this.

I help hundreds of merchants each year, and non will ever redirect when having the parameters in the URL. So It definitely is something on your shopify account that is causing this issue. And you should find what it is, and disable it.