How to fix: Inaccurate shipping costs (due to inconsistent shipping costs between your feed and the checkout pages on your website)

The shipping rates in your Merchant Center shipping settings or product data are lower than the shipping rates shown on your website during checkout.

Shipping costs are a major decision factor for online customers. If you provide shipping costs in Merchant Center that are lower than the costs provided on your website, a person is more likely to abort the checkout process, resulting in low conversion rates.

You should have received an email asking you to update your Merchant Center shipping rates by a certain date so that these values are consistent with those on your website.

You can specify shipping costs at the account level or at the product level. We recommend starting with a shipping setup for the whole account and then using product-level overrides when necessary.

Note: If provided, the shipping [shipping] attribute value will override the account-level shipping rate.

There are many shipping options that you can use to configure your shipping information. If these don't support your current shipping settings, you can slightly overestimate your shipping costs in your Merchant Center product data.

Instructions

Step 1: Ensure that shipping rates in Merchant Center match those on your website

1. Investigate your update process to see what could be causing the problem:
   • Check the warning email for examples of products that are affected. Look for a common problem in your product data that could cause these shipping cost mismatches.
   • Review the information you set up in the “Shipping services” tab on the “Shipping and returns” page, as well as the shipping [shipping] attribute rates.

Note: If provided, the shipping [shipping] attribute value will override the account level shipping rate.

2. Once you’ve addressed the problem, update the information in the “Shipping services” tab or the shipping [shipping] attribute (if applicable) in your product data to match your website shipping costs. If you’re unable to provide exact shipping rates, you can slightly overestimate the costs provided in Merchant Center.

Step 2: Resubmit your product data

After you’ve fixed the issue and updated your product data, resubmit it using one of these methods:

• Upload a feed
• Submit through the Content API
• Import content from an ecommerce platform

Step 3: Request a review

After you resubmit your product data that caused the mismatch, request an account review:

1. Sign in to your Merchant Center account.
2. Navigate to Account issues on the “Diagnostics” page.
3. Locate the account-level issue that you would like to have reviewed.
4. Make sure that there are in-stock products uploaded and all issues for the affected target country are resolved.
5. Click Request review.
6. Read the pop-up window to ensure that you understand the review process, and its requirements and limitations.
7. Check the box and click Request review.

Note: Review requests can take up to 5 days to complete. You’ll receive an email notification once the review has been completed.

After the review is performed, if your account meets the product data requirements, your account will be reactivated.

 

Need More Help?

Check out this guided help article: I need help fixing my shipping information in Merchant Center.

Related links

• Shipping [shipping]
• Set up shipping