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.
27

Yes, but unless Shopify have changed things in the last month it means that your client is charging the VAT inclusive price to everyone, including customers where VAT wouldn’t be charged, because that’s what that setting controls. In essence - international customers would be charged 20% extra.

For example - with that setting unchecked, with a client based in the UK selling internationally:

  • Product A is £30 in the backend, with “Charge tax on this item” switched on

  • Customer A in UK buys it, they pay £30 with £5 of the price (20%) being VAT - OK.

  • Customer B outside UK buys it, they pay £30 with £0 of the price being VAT - NOT OK.

Customer B has been overcharged 20% relative to Customer A. Customer B should only have paid £25.

So, you’re both right and wrong in my opinion. Unchecking that option does result in the same price being shown to everyone, but it also results in the same price being charged to everyone, which is not what we want.

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