Policy and contact links: what Merchant Center expects

Merchant Center expects your return and refund policy, your terms and a way to contact you to be easy to reach from any page a shopper lands on. A footer link on every page is the usual answer, and the links have to open the right page on product, cart and checkout templates, not just on the home page.

Major4 min read

By Edvinas Ivanauskas How the guides are reviewed

Why this matters

Three Google pages say the same thing in different words. The “Checkout requirements and best practices” page asks you to “Make sure that relevant details are clearly accessible throughout the checkout process, and that customers can find refund and return policy information, terms and conditions, and how to contact you.” Google’s fix page for a missing return policy suggests “a dedicated button in the footer of every page that links to your return and refund policy.” And the contact fix page asks that “at least one form of reachable contact (For example, email, phone, or contact form) is easily visible prior to checkout.”

Missing is not the only way to fail. The Misrepresentation policy lists a “Return and refund policy that is unclear, missing, or not easily discoverable.” Google’s fully-functional fix page says links “shouldn’t lead to 404 errors, or redirect back to the home page instead of the intended destination.” A footer link that 404s after a theme change, or one that sits on the home page and vanishes from the product template, leaves the policy hard to find from the very pages shoppers arrive on from Google.

Google gives an example, not a rulebook. A footer is one practical route, not a prescribed link set: a returns link in the cart, a returns summary on the product page and a contact link in the mobile menu all count, as long as a shopper can reach the page from where they are. Product Experts on Google’s Merchant Center Community push further: their guides put contact details and social links in every page footer and on the contact page, and policies in an easily accessible part of the site. It is hard to make a returns page too easy to find.

The free scan clicks through the policy links your store publishes. It reports a returns, shipping, privacy or contact link that goes to a page that no longer exists as a failure, and reports any returns, shipping, privacy or terms page it cannot find at all. Every link and policy check is on the misrepresentation checker, and the last few steps before payment are in policy links at checkout.

Typical evidence

Map the information routes your offer needs

Returns and refund terms, purchase terms, and contact information should be easy to reach through the shopping journey. This five-link grid is an example audit map, not a prescribed Google set.

ReturnsShippingPrivacyTermsContact

Page type

Returns

Shipping

Privacy

Terms

Contact

Homepage

Product page

Collection page

Checkout

Investigator’s note

Do not stop at the homepage. Check a representative product, collection, and cart path, then repair whichever information route is missing or broken.

StoreVerifier compliance desk

The public signals this check looks for:

Policy links appear in the home page footer but not on product, collection or cart templat…
Policy links appear in the home page footer but not on product, collection or cart templates.
The mobile menu has no route to returns or contact, and the footer sits below an endless p…
The mobile menu has no route to returns or contact, and the footer sits below an endless product grid.
A footer link returns a 404, or lands on the home page, after a migration renamed the poli…
A footer link returns a 404, or lands on the home page, after a migration renamed the policy pages.
Every policy hides in one collapsed menu labelled “Info” or “Legal”, or appears only as an…
Every policy hides in one collapsed menu labelled “Info” or “Legal”, or appears only as an image.
The contact link opens a form that fails when a shopper presses send
The contact link opens a form that fails when a shopper presses send.

What it looks like once it is right

Every template shares one footer with “Returns & refunds”, “Shipping”, “Terms”, “Privacy” and “Contact us”, each opening the live page. Product pages also show “Free 30-day returns – see our returns policy” under the price.

Common mistakes

Common mistake

The home page footer lists Returns, Shipping and Contact. Product pages use a different footer section with only social icons, and the one Returns link that does exist points at an old address that now returns a 404.

Fix checklist

Decide which pages a shopper needs: returns and refunds, shipping, terms, privacy and contact, plus payment if you keep it on a separate page.
Link them from the footer section your theme uses on every template, not only from the home page footer.
Open a product page, a collection page and the cart on a phone, and reach each policy and the contact page from there without using site search.
Click every link in a private window. Each should open the intended page, not a 404, a login screen or the home page.
Name the links plainly, such as “Returns & refunds”, “Shipping” and “Contact us”, rather than one “Info” or “Legal” heading for everything.
Where your theme allows it, add a one-line returns summary with a link on product pages, next to the price or the delivery information.
After a theme change, a migration or renaming a page, repeat the phone and private-window tests, and redirect old policy addresses to the new ones.

An example information-route audit

Map the policies and contact routes your own offer needs, then test representative shopping paths. Google does not prescribe this five-link footer layout.

ReturnsShippingPrivacyTermsContactHomeProductCollectionCheckout

Questions merchants ask

Which policy links does Google Merchant Center require in the footer?

Google’s pages do not prescribe a footer link set. They ask that return and refund information, terms and conditions and a way to contact you are easy to find, including throughout checkout, and Google’s return-policy fix page suggests a footer button on every page as one way to do it. Returns, shipping, terms, privacy and contact in a footer used by every template covers it.

Do the links need to be on product pages, or is the home page enough?

Shoppers from Google land on product pages, so the links should be reachable from there. Google’s checkout requirements ask for relevant details to be accessible throughout the checkout process too. One footer used by every template is the simplest way to get both.

Is a broken policy link a problem?

Yes. Google’s fully-functional fix page says links shouldn’t lead to 404 errors or redirect back to the home page, and StoreVerifier’s free scan reports a published returns, shipping, privacy or contact link that goes to a missing page as a failure. See broken links and 404s for tracking them down.

Remediation

Risk signal

Links rot quietly: a theme update, a renamed page, a new mobile menu. Nobody notices until the one shopper who needed the returns page cannot find it, and that shopper does not write in to tell you. Test the routes from a product page on a phone after every change and fix what breaks the same day.

PriorityAddress and document this finding as part of the store’s remediation work.

EvidenceRecord the current state before each change, apply the fix, then capture the corrected state so every change is evidenced.

Similar cases

Sources

Community guidance

Written by Product Experts, the users Google recognises for their answers on its Merchant Center Community forum. Often stricter than Google’s help pages, and not Google policy.

Last reviewed 24 Sep 2026.

That is one issue. The library documents 134.

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