Google Merchant Center: common rejections and how to fix them

Google Merchant Center rejects products and accounts for specific, fixable reasons. This article walks through the issues we see most often with Everspring resellers, what each one means, and exactly what to do about it.

1. Your domain isn't verified or claimed

Symptom: Products silently don't appear in one or more countries (often Germany, France, or other EU markets), even though the feed shows them as approved.

Cause: Domain verification and claim weren't completed. Without this, Google blocks your products from appearing — but in the feed you might just see vague warnings, not a hard error.

Fix: Go to GMC settings → Business information → Website. Verify ownership (HTML upload, meta tag, GTM, or Analytics) and click Claim. See setting up Google Merchant Center.

2. Brand field is wrong

Symptom: Listings rejected with "Incorrect brand" or flagged as potentially counterfeit.

Cause: The brand field contains "Everspring", your store name, or some generic value — not the actual brand of the product (e.g. Elho, your own private-label name).

Fix: The brand field must contain the manufacturer's brand name, the brand printed on the product itself, or your own registered brand if you private-label. Everspring is your supplier platform, not the product brand. Update your feed mapping so the brand attribute pulls from the correct source.

3. EAN/GTIN conflicts

Symptom: Listings rejected, suppressed, or showing low impressions despite seemingly correct setup. In severe cases: account-level warnings about identifier issues.

Cause: You're submitting the manufacturer's EAN. That same EAN is in use by dozens of other resellers selling the same product. Google sees a flooded identifier and either shows none of you, picks one based on opaque criteria, or in repeat patterns flags the account.

Fix: Use your own EANs, registered to your own brand via GS1 and a trademark with BOIP/EUIPO. See brand registration and EANs. This is the single highest-leverage fix in this list.

4. Price doesn't match landing page

Symptom: Listings disapproved with "Mismatched price" or worse — full account suspension for "misrepresentation".

Cause: The price in your feed differs from the price shown on the product page when Google's crawler visits. Common causes: cached feed not updated after a sale, currency mismatch, VAT toggled differently between feed and webshop, or a bug in your integrator's price mapping.

Fix: Ensure your feed update frequency matches your pricing change rate. Confirm both feed and landing page show the same VAT-inclusive price in the same currency. If you run sales, the sale price must be reflected in the feed within hours.

5. Missing or empty attributes

Symptom: Specific products rejected with attribute-level errors (missing shipping, missing google_product_category, missing color for an apparel item, etc.).

Cause: Required fields aren't being populated, or category-specific required fields are missing. Different categories have different requirements: apparel needs gender, size, age group, and color; food needs ingredients; cosmetics need a unit price.

Fix: Open GMC's Diagnostics view, group by error type, and address each one. Map the missing fields in your integrator or webshop product data.

6. Wrong attributes for the category

Symptom: Listings flagged as low-quality or with attribute warnings.

Cause: Attributes from one category accidentally applied to a different category — for example, clothing fields (gender, size, age group) populated on a plant pot. Usually a side effect of a generic feed mapping that didn't account for category mix.

Fix: In your integrator, set up conditional rules per category. Only populate attributes that apply. Remove or null out the rest.

7. Incomplete shipping configuration

Symptom: Listings disapproved with "Missing shipping" or country-level suppression.

Cause: Shipping rates not configured in GMC settings, or the per-product shipping attribute missing for products that ship to multiple zones.

Fix: Configure default shipping rates per country in GMC settings. For products with non-standard shipping (e.g. larger Everspring items with surcharges), use the per-product shipping attribute to override.

8. Image quality issues

Symptom: Listings rejected with "Image too small", "Promotional overlay", or similar.

Cause: Images below 250×250 pixels (Google's hard minimum), watermarks, sale stickers overlaid on the image, placeholder images, or generic stock photos instead of the actual product.

Fix: Use real product images, minimum 800×800 pixels recommended, no overlays, no text. White or transparent background preferred for the main image.

9. Duplicate or generic content

Symptom: Listings approved but ranking poorly, or quality warnings on the account.

Cause: Titles and descriptions are identical to those used by many other resellers (because everyone is using the supplier-provided text). Google penalises feeds that look like undifferentiated aggregations.

Fix: Write your own titles and descriptions for at least your top SKUs. See write unique and persuasive product descriptions.

10. Account-level suspensions

Symptom: Entire GMC account suspended, all products offline.

Cause: Misrepresentation (significant price mismatches, fake stock, misleading claims), policy violations (restricted product categories), or accumulated quality issues across the account.

Fix: Read Google's suspension notice carefully — it points to the policy violated. Fix the underlying issue across your entire feed, then submit a reconsideration request. Don't submit a request without fixing first; rejected reconsiderations are harder to recover from.