Tax issue Google Shopping and Shopify causing mismatched value (page crawl) [price]

Accounting & Taxes

Topic summary

Core Issue:
Shopify stores selling in the EU/UK face price mismatches in Google Merchant Center when using location-based VAT settings. Google’s crawlers see prices excluding VAT (often from non-EU IP addresses), while product feeds contain VAT-inclusive prices, triggering automatic price updates or product rejections.

Root Cause:
Shopify’s hidden geolocation feature displays different prices based on visitor location before checkout. When “Include or exclude tax based on customer’s country” is enabled, international visitors see ex-VAT prices immediately, which Google’s crawlers detect and flag as mismatches.

Attempted Solutions:

  • Disabling automatic updates in Google Merchant Center: Temporarily fixes price display but may cause product rejections
  • Resubmitting sitemaps: Helped some users after Google recrawled
  • Custom code workarounds: Calculating VAT-inclusive prices in theme code when cart.taxes_included is false
  • Tax overrides for crawled countries: Adding tax rates for countries Google crawls from (e.g., Andorra)

Most Effective Solution:
Shopify can disable the automatic geolocation-based price adjustment feature on request (confirmed working for Shopify Plus accounts). This ensures all visitors see consistent VAT-inclusive prices until entering shipping details at checkout.

Current Status:
Recent reports (2023-2024) indicate Shopify support is inconsistent about disabling this feature, particularly for non-Plus accounts. The issue remains unresolved for many merchants, with no user-accessible setting to control this behavior. Google Shopping requires landing page prices to match feed prices regardless of visitor location.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
18

Hi,

we solved the issue. I cannot fully reproduce how, but will tell you all I got:

  • the issue starts with the merchant center crawler who uses this link ending: /currency=EUR or whatever currency.

  • this selected some other country, which we do not charge tax for and therfore it showed google net prices.

  • we have the geolocation app, install it and activate the country selector. Then go to your site and look at the countries you can select. I think with th currency=eur ening, it selects the first eur country.

  • I cannot recall fully, where you can edit this list, but its in shopify settings.

Solution:

we put a country into the list, we dont even ship to (Andorra) and added a tax override of 19% (german VAT). Google now crawls andorra prices (net, but + our tax) so no price mismatch.

You should try out some countries, but if you cannot add any other british pund countries, just remove all but UK.

cheers