Why isn't Google Merchant Center recognizing all my eWallet payment methods?

[AlBu07]

Hi all,

For those of you who use Google Merchant Center, you may have noticed that in the "Shopping experience scorecard" they have recently introduced "eWallet" number of payment methods. The problem is that even though I have 3 out of 4 (Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal) e-wallet methods activated, GMC only shows 1/4.

I have contacted google support to understand why and here's what they told me (which I think is a bit of rubbish): 

I have consulted this with the wider team and based on their findings, the reason why it is not detected is due to Meta tags not updated on the site for indexing. As per resource, you should need to update the site with meta tags

I think what they're trying to say here is that the crawler is unable to access the checkout page to establish the number of available payment methods. I believe this is because of "Disallow" commands in robots.txt

Does anyone know how to solve that and get all the payment methods reflected on "Shopping experience scorecard"?

Thank you very much in advance.

Al

[EmmanuelFlossie]

The scorecard, and its information is updated once every 3 to 4 weeks. So if you have not waited this long, then make sure you do.

It said that in Google Merchant Center Classic at one point, can't find it again, but I would assume this is still the case.

[AlBu07]

No, unfortunately, that's not the case. The same payments methods have been available on the store for nearly 2 years.

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Reading into the documentation, if Google is not including your eWallets, then I recommend checking: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/14187023?sjid=10951414677735878840-AP

As you highlighted robots.txt in your first post, did you make any edits, to resolve the issue?

[AlBu07]

I went through that article a bunch of times, but it doesn't provide the answers that I need.

I made changes to robots.txt last night, but not sure if that's what they need. I mean the checkout page doesn't really exist until something is in a cart, so how is the bot going to crawl the checkout page without actually going through the checkout process? That's what is confusing me. There must be an answer to this since hundreds of thousands of vendors are using Shopify + Google Ads. I can't be the only one questioning it.

[ctwork3120]

Did you get a resolution to this? I've been facing the exact same issue for a month despite always having 4+ e-wallet options and this never being an issue

[AlBu07]

No, still the same. I've escalated the issue to Google's senior support staff, however, for some reason I doubt that this will change anything.

I can't believe that this issue is not questioned by thousands of vendors. Or are we missing something?

[ctwork3120]

Idk. Neither google or Shopify have been very helpful in trying to triage
this. Hopefully we can get it figured out. Which theme are you using? I’m
using Turbo from out of sandbox and have a ticket in with them to see if
they’re able to help or seeing anyone else encounter this

[AlBu07]

I don't think it has anything to do with a theme, to be honest. Google needs to crawl a checkout page (which is the same on all stores, regardless of a theme) to be able to establish the available payment methods. I've now allowed "/checkout" to be crawled through robots.txt, but I still struggle to understand this. The "/checkout" url is inactive unless there are items in cart or user initiates a direct checkout through a product page. How is Google meant to crawl that then? It really is annoying at this point.

[ctwork3120]

Which robot/agent specifically did you allow to crawl the checkout page?

[pf1977]

Waiting on a reply from Google myself for this.  It has been escalated........

[ctwork3120]

Did you ever get this solved? 

[AlBu07]

No.. Still waiting to hear back from Google. Any updates on your end?

[ctwork3120]

none unfortunately they just continue to give me the runaround 

[ctwork3120]

Still nothing? They've ghosted my support ticket on this.

[AlBu07]

Mine actually got fixed. But at this point, I'm not sure whether it was me being relentless in my emails to them or whether it was the changes I made to the robots.txt file.

[ctwork3120]

Nice! Glad you got it fixed. What did you edit within your robots.txt file?
I've added the below, but this hasn't worked:

User-agent: Storebot-Google
Allow: /checkouts/
Allow: /checkout
Allow: /carts

[Lahov]

Did it finally work? Facing same issue with GMC. 

[Willosharp]

Did all of your 3 wallet options show or just some of them? 

[pf1977]

Same.  I only realized it was fixed when I noticed I was a top quality store doing a google search. Not sure what I did to get it sorted, but happy it's sorted.  Hope everyone else here has the same random luck!

[AdventureParts]

I am having the same issue. If you don't mind what edits did you make to the robots.txt file. I have created the template but I am not sure exactly what to allow in order to fix the issue. Your help would be greatly appreciated since you were able to resolve this.

[Lahov]

Hey! Could you please share some instructions for robots.txt editing?

[Dirk]

Hey, we have some step-by-step guide on how to edit robots.txt files that you can take a look at. 

Note: This is an unsupported customization. Shopify Support can't help with edits to the robots.txt.liquid file. If you need to edit your robots.txt.liquid file, then you can hire a Shopify Partner to edit the code for you. Incorrect use of the feature can result in loss of all traffic. 

If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.