Hi there,
Our company has been using Google Merchant Center and Google Ads since 2021. We had a marketing company set up our accounts, import all of our products and managed all of the settings in GMC. We have not had any major issues with our account until the last few months. We received a policy warning because our tax information was incorrect. It appears that when the products were set up the tax information was not set up by the agency we hired (we have not worked with them in years and do not wish to go back to them.). To fix this we went in and corrected our tax settings state by state in GMC and requested a review. The review came negative and our account was then suspended. They sent us two emails, one with examples of the tax information still being incorrect as well as a second one finding issues with our shipping data. After looking into it further we came to realize that the tax was incorrect because the shipping price in the GMC feed is incorrect and thus was creating inaccurate pricing data.
After more digging we have realized that even though we have our GMC settings set to UPS Ground as the shipping option (and the one that we most commonly use) the feed in GMC is based on generic carrier rates and not the negotiated rate that our company receives (which fluctuates month to month based on shipping volume). We have used a Shopify supported app for almost 2 years, it manages our complicated shipping settings (negotiated UPS rate, $ per box fee, % cc fee, as well as other special cases that have a flat rate).
Our value on the landing page (shopify checkout) is accurate with what the customer pays but the GMC value in the data feed displays a much lower price. GMC seems to be very limited in its ability to layer shipping policies. I reached out to Google about this issue and was given this response - “you can indeed create multiple shipping policies in GMC to apply different shipping methods (carrier rates, item-based rates, or percentage-based fees) to your products but not simultaneously.”. Which seems to mean that we cannot have them all apply like we can in our Shopify checkout. They suggested the following - “you can achieve layered shipping rates using advanced cost tables. This allows you to combine different shipping rules and criteria to create a more customized shipping experience based on Price, Weight, Destination, or Number of items”. But that does not help us with the negotiated UPS rate or % fee. Adding Shipping attributes also seems to not be a solution since they are also limited to location, price and shipping/handling times modifications.
We were advised to add the Google and Youtube app into our Shopify Sales Channels and we connected our GMC account to it in an attempt to potentially fix the feed issue. But now its showing all of our products duplicated (we have about 400+ and now its 900+, so double what we currently have). We are not sure how to fix this either now - the current data source listed in GMC is Content API (but its showing 900+) products in the source line.
I understand that Google prefers to see a value that is equal to or more than what the real shipping price will be, not less. We have 500+ individual products and it seems like the only way to maybe do this is to manually modify the shipping price in GMC to be whatever the max price shipping could be? Which seems like it would be not only time consuming but also not reliable as a solution.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can make our GMC shipping values match more closely with what Shopify generates in checkout? And how to fix the product duplication in the Content API feed?
