Need Help with Google Merchant Center Disapprovals for Free Listings (Shopify Multi-Store Setup)
Hey everyone,
I’ve been struggling with a persistent issue for over a month and I’m hoping someone here might be able to help me out. I’ve set up a multi-store on Shopify for both the US and UK markets and every time I submit my products to Google Merchant Center, they get disapproved within 8-12 hours. I’ve followed Google’s guidelines to the best of my knowledge, but I keep encountering the same issue repeatedly.
The disapproval notice is related to “Misrepresentation” (see screenshot attached), and it’s preventing all my products from showing in the UK, despite multiple attempts to fix it. Here are a few things I’ve done so far:
I wanted to let you know that I ensured transparency about my business identity, model, and policies on my Merchant Center and online store.
Used professional designs for my stores and made sure SSL certificates are properly installed.
Provided detailed business information in Merchant Center.
Followed SEO guidelines, updated product data, and more.
Despite all of this, the products keep getting disapproved for “misrepresentation,” and I’ve been stuck in this loop for a while now. Has anyone here experienced the same issue with free listings on Google Merchant Center and found a solution?
Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
The short answer is:
The persistent “Misrepresentation” disapproval for your UK free listings, despite your efforts on transparency, is highly likely due to a critical disconnect in your multi-store setup, specifically the inconsistent and insufficient data exchange between your Shopify stores and Google Merchant Center (GMC), which Google views as deceptive.
The immediate, actionable solution is to move beyond the native Shopify Google & YouTube app for your UK feed and implement a custom server-side data synchronization using the Shopify API and the Google Merchant API.
This integration, ideally hosted on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Stape server-side container, allows you to meticulously control and localize all critical product attributes like price, availability, currency (GBP for UK), and shipping/return policies at the item level, ensuring the data presented to Google’s crawlers via the Google Merchant API exactly matches the local UK storefront, thus resolving the core data inconsistency that triggers the misrepresentation flag.
The long answer is:
The “Misrepresentation” policy violation is almost never about a single missing policy, but rather a holistic lack of “trust signals” which, in a multi-store setup like yours (US and UK), is most often compounded by data inconsistency.
While you’ve made efforts on transparency, the core problem is that the default data feed method, typically through the Shopify Google & YouTube app, struggles to maintain separate, compliant, and localized feeds for multiple countries with differing currencies, prices, and shipping rules.
Google’s crawlers see a mismatch between the product data in the feed (which may default to US settings or have cross-store errors) and the landing page experience for the UK user, resulting in the misrepresentation disapproval.
To resolve this, you must engineer a robust, server-side data pipeline.
You should use the Shopify API, specifically endpoints like the Product API and Webhooks, to pull real-time product data and stock levels for your UK store instance.
This data is then transformed and enriched server-side in a controlled environment like a GCP Cloud Function or a custom application running in a Stape container.
The crucial next step is utilizing the Google Merchant API (formerly Content API for Shopping) to programmatically insert and update your product listings in the Google Merchant Center.
This API-driven approach provides granular control, allowing you to explicitly set the correct target_country as ‘GB’, the correct currency as ‘GBP’, and – most importantly – to pass highly localized shipping and tax attributes that perfectly align with your UK store’s policies, all of which are primary triggers for misrepresentation.
This method bypasses the limitations of the standard app-based feed and is cost-effective because it uses cloud compute resources only when updates are necessary, offering a permanent, high-fidelity solution that builds the necessary trust with Google’s enforcement algorithms.
Furthermore, for future reporting and analysis, you can leverage the BigQuery API to push the complete, clean product data and feed status information into a data warehouse, which can then be visualized in Looker Studio for a full 360-degree view of your product health and performance across both markets, making problem diagnosis immediate, should any future issues arise.
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