Advanced account setup

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A Merchant Center advanced account setup allows a single user or company to manage data for more than one account by submitting data feeds for multiple website domains. Each sub-account can have a distinct store name and a unique website URL.

Advanced account setup is recommended for businesses that manage multiple sellers and domains at scale, such as marketplaces and multi-country retailers. Most customers don’t need an advanced account to get the most out of Merchant Center.

Note: Avoid having multiple websites that contain similar content, as this could lead to account disapproval. Learn more about duplicate content in the abuse of network policy.

Convert to an advanced account setup

Requirements

You must be an account admin.
Your account cannot be a multi-client account (MCA), or a sub-account in an existing MCA.
You cannot have an existing account-level policy violation.

Instructions

In your Merchant Center, click the tools and settings icon , and then click Account settings.
On the “Account settings” page, click Advanced account setup.
Click Request conversion.
Select the options that best describe your business. For business definitions go to "Why convert to an advanced account setup" below.
Click Request conversion.

What to expect

You can check the status of your request by visiting the “Account settings” page.
Requests may take several days to process. You will receive an email once this process is complete.
If you successfully convert to an advanced account setup, you will receive a new MCA, and your current Merchant Center account will become a sub-account of this new MCA. You can verify and claim websites under your multi-client account by following the steps below.

Note: If you plan to upload a large number of feeds or make frequent changes to your product data, it is strongly recommended that you upload this directly using the Content API.

Who should convert to an advanced account setup

Merchants with multiple brands: These merchants own multiple brands and sell products in physical stores or online on multiple domains.
International retailers: These retailers sell products from one brand internationally, on one or multiple domains, online or in physical stores.
Marketplaces: An online platform that provides a place for multiple individual merchants to sell their products. Learn more about marketplaces.
Advertising agencies: These agencies provide SEO consulting services to merchants and sometimes set up advertising campaigns on their behalf.
Channel partners: These partners allow merchants to list their product offers on different channels (like marketplaces and comparison shopping services), and typically also provide related services.
Store builders: These platforms allow merchants to set up an online store to list and sell products.

Note: If you want to connect your Google account to multiple Merchant Center accounts, for example, in order to manage their feeds, you can request to be added as a user by the respective account admin.

Verifying and claiming your websites under a multi-client account

We recommend MCA owners verify and claim a website URL with the parent account login email of the advanced account setup. Typically, the parent MCA will need to verify and claim the top-level domain, for example, https://example.com.

If the sub-account website URLs are sub-hosts or paths under the MCA claimed URL tree

After the parent MCA setup has verified and claimed a URL, each sub-account can automatically inherit the claim and can set its website URL to any sub-host or path under the claimed URL tree.

If the sub-accounts span multiple websites

These are the ways that you can verify and claim website URLs depending on how you’re managing your MCA and domains:

If the parent MCA user manages the website URLs for each sub-account, the MCA user can verify and claim each URL in the sub-account settings (for example, multi-brand merchants).
If the parent MCA user doesn't manage the website URLs for each sub-account, each sub-account can verify and claim their website within their respective Google Search Console accounts and share the verification status with the parent MCA user in Search Console (for example, agencies that aren't web developers for their customers' websites). Learn more about how to verify and claim your store's website
If a sub-account doesn't wish to share verification status with the parent MCA, you can add a website owner as a user of the sub-account. The website owner will then be able to verify and claim the URL for that sub-account in the sub-account settings (for example, agencies that manage their customers’ feeds).

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