How to audit your checkout for Merchant Center, step by step

A slow walk from product page to payment, writing down the price, fees, currency, availability and policy links on every screen. Boring. Effective. Google’s “Checkout requirements and best practices” page is your checklist. The price must not go up at checkout, though a promotion may lower it. Every page from the product page to checkout must show the same currency. Availability in your product data must match the product page and checkout pages. A minimum order value belongs in your shipping settings, and fees that are not government-imposed belong in your Merchant Center shipping costs. Checkout must be secured with a valid SSL certificate. And customers must be able to find refund and return policy information, terms and conditions and how to contact you throughout the checkout. Use three products, a simple one, one with variants and one on sale, logged out, and stop at the payment step. Mark each screen where a value changes. The first change is where the fix goes.

Google's “Checkout requirements and best practices” page is the checklist, and it is more concrete than most merchants expect. Work through it screen by screen, product page first, and write down what you see.

On the product page, the price is the baseline. It must include VAT where the country requires it, and in the US and Canada it must exclude sales tax; tax at checkout has the detail. Availability has to agree too: “The product availability in your product data must match the availability on your product page and checkout pages.” A listing that says in stock beside a page that says sold out is a mismatch before the shopper even reaches the cart.

In the cart and checkout, the rule is simple: “The price must not increase at checkout, but it can be reduced after the product is added to the cart if a promotion is applied.” Fees that are not government-imposed belong in your Merchant Center shipping costs, which hidden checkout fees covers. If you have a minimum order, Google says: “If a minimum value must be met before a purchase is completed or shipped, set that value in your shipping settings.” And the currency cannot change on the way: “All pages from the product page to the checkout page must consistently show the same currency.”

At the account and payment steps, the tests are the ones in account creation at checkout: sign-up free, no app, no device change, business fields optional. The checkout must be on HTTPS, and Google's account guidelines ask for at least one conventional method of payment.

Throughout, one rule covers everything else: “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.” Leaving them out is not a style choice; the Misrepresentation policy lists “Missing merchant terms and conditions or shipping information” among its examples.

The free scan does the first pass of this audit for you. It puts a product in the basket, walks the public checkout up to payment and reports a higher cart price and a checkout that is not on HTTPS as failures; it flags missing policy links and a minimum order value it meets on the way. The payment itself, your shipping settings and your product data are a manual check against this sheet. Every check it runs is listed on the misrepresentation checker.