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.
7

Hi, and again thanks.

I saw that tool yesterday and I can’t see any issues that would cause the problem. There is only one price field we use in Shopify and its OK for the majority of our products. We do not have nay b2b or wholesale plug ons. We have chosen that vat be applied on all goods.

We are connected to Google via API and another app. We have deleted all feeds (we had 2 at one stage) and reset.

When looking at the feed in merchant centre it shows 2 imports for some products. One for local inventory (that we don’t use) and one for search, and display and ads. The local inventory price is Inc VAT but the other is not. Same product, the same Sku, same feed. So Google is getting the right info but randomly deducting the VAT.

Any ideas. Thanks.

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