Public business address and customer contact

Put a real street address and at least one working contact route on your store, as text, where shoppers look: the footer and the contact page. Google asks for your name, address and phone number to be identical on the site and in Merchant Center, so write them once and copy them everywhere. It is the least glamorous page on the site, and the one a worried shopper opens first.

Critical4 min read

By Edvinas Ivanauskas How the guides are reviewed

Why this matters

Google's fix page for missing contact information, written for stores with a “Misrepresentation” or “Website needs improvement” notice, opens with the minimum: “Show at least a business address, phone number, email, contact form, or social media business profile on your online store.” Its audit list then asks for consistent business info, “identical in your website footer, contact page, and Merchant Center settings”, and asks that “at least one form of reachable contact (For example, email, phone, or contact form) is easily visible prior to checkout”. Business info in Merchant Center asks for the address “where your business is registered”.

Google's onboarding checklist is more specific about the address. It asks you to “Clearly state your main operational hub (City, State/Country).” and to “Provide a verifiable street address that perfectly aligns with your formal business registration, ensuring uniformity across your Homepage and Contact pages.” Read together: a street address, the registered one, written the same on the home page, the contact page and in Business info, plus a plain line about where you operate from if that is somewhere else.

Product Experts on Google's Merchant Center Community ask for an “exact physical street address” in every footer and on the contact page, where the owner is “physically present and operating during posted business hours”. If you work from home and hate the idea of your address online, you are not alone; read P.O. boxes and virtual offices before you pick, because there is an honest way through. Returns have their own address question, covered in return addresses.

The free scan flags a footer with no physical address and a store with no contact page. It cannot see Business info, so line that up yourself. Every contact check is listed on the misrepresentation checker.

Typical evidence

What a usable public address looks like

Give shoppers a real, complete business address they can understand and contact. StoreVerifier can capture public address text, but it does not verify ownership or determine any platform result.

Published business address

Acme Retail Ltd, 14 King Street, Bristol BS1 4EF

VerdictShown clearly on this example page

The public signals this check looks for:

The footer has a logo, some links and a copyright line, and no address
The footer has a logo, some links and a copyright line, and no address.
The only contact route is a form, and the address appears nowhere
The only contact route is a form, and the address appears nowhere.
The contact page and the footer write the address differently…
The contact page and the footer write the address differently: another unit number, an old postcode, a different town.
The contact page gives a city and no street
The contact page gives a city and no street.
Business info holds the owner's home address while the site shows a business address, or t…
Business info holds the owner's home address while the site shows a business address, or the other way round.
Contact details sit in an image or a map embed, with no text version
Contact details sit in an image or a map embed, with no text version.

What it looks like once it is right

Footer and contact page: “Acme Home (Acme Retail Ltd), Unit 3, 12 Mill Road, Leeds LS2 7AB, United Kingdom · 0113 496 0123 · help@acme.co.uk”. Business info holds the same address and number.

Common mistakes

Common mistake

The footer shows “Acme Home · Leeds” and a contact form. The contact page repeats the form. Business info holds “Unit 3, 12 Mill Road, Wakefield”. A shopper cannot tell where the business is or how to reach it without writing in.

Fix checklist

Take the address from your registration or tax documents. That is the one for Merchant Center Business info.
Put it in the footer on every page as text: business name, street, town, postcode, country.
Put it on the contact page with at least one other way to reach you: a phone number, or an email on your own domain.
Copy the same lines everywhere, with the same unit number, postcode and spelling: home page, contact page, About page, policies and Business info.
If you pack and ship from somewhere else, say so in one line: “We pack and ship from our unit in Wakefield.”
Test it signed out on a phone: can you find the address and a contact route without adding anything to the cart?
After a move, update the site, Business info and your registration together, on the same day.

Clear details where customers look

Keep the business details you publish current and understandable. This is a public-copy check, not a test of account data or business legitimacy.

14 High Street, London EC1A 1BBexample

Sitewide footerpresent · plain text

Contact pagepresent

About pagepresent

Contact pagepresent

Customer routestated clearly

Questions merchants ask

Does my store need a physical address for Google Merchant Center?

Google's fix page asks for at least one of a business address, phone number, email, contact form or social business profile on the store, and Merchant Center Business info asks for the address where your business is registered. Google's onboarding checklist asks for a verifiable street address that lines up with your registration. In practice, publish it.

Where should the address go on my website?

Google's contact fix page names the website footer and the contact page, and asks for the name, address and phone number there to be identical to your Merchant Center settings. Its onboarding checklist also names the homepage. Text in the footer covers every page at once.

What if I work from home and do not want my address online?

Use the address your business is registered at. If that is a registered office or an accountant's address, label it and say where you operate from. The guides on P.O. boxes and virtual offices cover the honest options.

Remediation

Risk signal

An address and a way to get in touch are what separate a shop from a website that happens to sell things. Write them once, copy them everywhere Google and shoppers look, and let the free scan tell you when a theme update quietly drops them from the footer.

PriorityTreat this and any other highest-severity findings as first-priority work, then document each fix.

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.

How to fix your Merchant Center suspension (Misrepresentation), 2026Merchant Center Community · Product Expert guide — support.google.com

Last reviewed 29 Sep 2026.

That is one issue. The library documents 134.

The free scan lists what it finds on your store. The paid report adds the affected pages, captured evidence and step-by-step fixes. Start free, with no account needed.