How to audit your Merchant Center shipping settings

Put every shipping policy in one table beside your shipping page and a real checkout, one row per country and service, and fix every row that disagrees. It takes an hour. Finding the same gap after a warning email takes longer. In Merchant Center, open each policy under Shipping and returns: note the countries, products covered, order cutoff, handling time, transit time and cost. Google’s “Set up shipping settings for an entire account” page asks you to choose the cost option that mirrors how you charge on your site. Add your shipping page’s figures and test checkouts either side of any free-delivery threshold. Two lines on that page explain most surprises: when several policies cover one product in one country, the lowest cost is the one displayed, so a forgotten cheap policy can beat the new one; and a platform such as Shopify syncing through the API may overwrite manual changes. Delete duplicates, check each policy’s currency, and change things at the source the sync reads.

Shipping lives under “Shipping and returns” in Merchant Center, on the “Shipping policies” tab. Google’s “Set up shipping settings for an entire account” page walks through what each policy holds: the countries it covers, the products it applies to (all, or a group marked with [shipping_label]), the shipping speed (order cutoff, handling time and transit time) and the cost. For the cost it says: “Choose the shipping cost option that mirrors how you charge for shipping on your site.” There can be a lot of them: “You may configure up to 20 shipping policies per country.”

Two lines on the same page explain most surprises. First, the cheapest policy wins: “If you provide multiple shipping information for a product in the same country, we’ll calculate the lowest shipping cost for the product for a given situation and display that rate and the associated shipping speed to customers.” An old, cheap policy you forgot about can quietly beat the new one. Second, your platform may rewrite your work: “Updates to your shipping settings made using the automated API, including that by a third party platform such as Shopify, may overwrite manual updates from Merchant Center.” Audit what is there now, not what you remember setting.

The “Checkout requirements and best practices” page adds money rules to check while you are in there. “If a minimum value must be met before a purchase is completed or shipped, set that value in your shipping settings.” “If you charge a minimum order value surcharge on top of the shipping cost, make sure the surcharge is included in your shipping settings.” Handling and service fees belong in the shipping cost too; see hidden checkout fees. And none of it works without settings at all: the “Issues in Merchant Center” page says “Your account must have shipping settings that are set up on the account or item-level” in countries where shipping is required.

Manual check: StoreVerifier does not see your Merchant Center settings, so the audit table is yours to fill. The free scan gives you the website column: it reports a missing shipping page as a failure and flags a shipping page that states no cost or delivery time. Each of those checks is on the misrepresentation checker. When the table is done, keep the site and settings together with shipping on your site vs Merchant Center.