Shopify Sending All Active Discount Codes to Google . .

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Shopify began automatically syncing all active discount codes to Google Merchant Center around October 2021, causing private/internal codes (employee discounts, VIP customer codes, etc.) to become publicly visible in Google Shopping results. This change was reportedly buried in Google app Terms & Conditions updates without clear communication or changelog entries.

Key Issues:

  • Merchants discovered customers using private discount codes never intended for public use
  • Codes appeared in Google Shopping with promotional badges, accessible to anyone
  • No option exists in Shopify to designate codes as public vs. private
  • The feature applies to US merchants using Shopify’s Google channel app

Current Workarounds:

  • Manually disable individual promotions in Google Merchant Center (Marketing > Promotions)
  • Disable the entire Promotions program in Merchant Center (Growth > Manage Programs)
  • Disable “deals discovery” in Google Merchant Center integrations
  • Use third-party apps instead of Shopify’s free Google app for more control
  • Recent Shopify versions may include a checkbox on discount creation to control Google sharing

Merchant Requests:
Shoppers want Shopify to add native controls for:

  • Public/private designation when creating discounts
  • Sales channel selection for code visibility
  • Product/collection exclusions

Shopify Support acknowledged this as a “known issue” but no comprehensive fix has been implemented as of the discussion timeline.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Addendum 12/14/21

Still not sure how and when these codes are being shown.

Here is an example of what we found when we were trying to figure out what was going on:

  1. Did a Google search on a product that really never goes on sale because it sells so well.

  2. Went to the ‘Shopping’ tab after search was done

  3. As we scrolled down the page, saw the product with a ‘sticker’ on it saying “30% off”

we knew this was odd because this product wouldn’t usually be on sale

  1. Clicked on the picture and this is what was displayed (store name has been blurred. )

  2. If you hovered over the discount code…it would display the entire code. The customer would
    then copy it and use it when checking out. This is how customers used these codes on
    a handful of order before we noticed it.

So… somehow, someway these got included in googles search results??? This is really weird

The attached pic is a screenshot from the Shopping search result page

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