Dealing with google's merchant center could be tiring , some products would get blocked , the account might get banned … and sometimes the answer is just "open a new account".. so here are my 5 golden wolftips to use when starting a new merchant center account on google:
1. Set up the account as late as possible, don't rush to open it up because you're more likely to just do the job twice, take into consideration something like a week, you want to make sure that you claimed the URL, that you have a solid refund policy, you have SSL on checkout page, that you show the actual prices on both your feed and site, that your images are clean and don't have any texts in them.
2. Google is actually going to check the address of the store and they’d want to make sure that everything is legit so make sure you have papers like utility bills to really show that your offices are in this location etc.
3. If you're using a marketing oriented e-commerce store, like
4. Make sure you apply and enable the google customer survey features, there's an app for that too, but in this case you still have to enable the customer survey feature inside the merchant account, that's going to pop an opt-in message to anyone who just finished buying and ask them if they want to answer a survey once they get the product, if you want a wolf tip from me – make sure you set the settings to pop much later on than the actual shipping times, so for example if normal avg shipping times are 5 days, set it to even 15 business days, that would help you lower the negative feedback of people who never received their package or just didn't get enough time to really test the product so you'll end up getting a lot of good feedback. Once you get 100 reviews your search ads are going to get the reviews stars and that's going to help a lot of conversion rate and CTRs, you'll also get a badge to display on your site and landing pages so that's pretty cool feature too. By the way – an easier way of getting those customer reviews would be integrating with Yotpo that’s working with google and is trusted by google
5. Enroll in Google’s promotions program, make sure you know how to write your promotion so it suits their policy, it shouldn't be vague and you'll get more traffic doing that, and in general Google’s surface placements are free now and should be giving you some free organic traffic.
6. This is not really about Google’s merchant center, but it's an important thing that people tend to forget – Bing and actually Microsoft have their own merchant centers, and after you get everything approved on google you can automatically import those products to bing's merchant center account and get more shopping traffic through there… I highly suggest you do that if Google’s shopping network traffic is converting for you.
7. If you have more than 5 different products on your store – make sure you enable and use dynamic retargeting, seems obvious to me – but I've seen tons of accounts running without it , you need to enable it right now and it's right under growth > manage programs