Image Credit: Unsplash @szolkin

From April 6 2021, Google will start rigorous checks on price accuracy on Merchant Center feeds, product feeds and at the checkout stage. Google announced the commitment to enforce a policy that requires all merchants selling on google to show accurate prices for all products within their product feeds, across their website landing pages and up to checkout. Showing a higher price at checkout compared to the advertised price will result in the suspension of the responsible merchant account.

As detailed in Google’s checkout requirements :

“People expect to pay the advertised price for your products. If the price of a product advertised in a Shopping ad or free product listing is different from the price shown in a customer’s shopping cart, that could create a negative experience for the customer and could result in the loss of a sale.

 To ensure that your product’s price is clear, follow these requirements. The price of your product should be consistent throughout the checkout process, not just between the product feed and your landing page. The price shouldn’t increase at checkout. It may, however, be lowered after the product is added to the cart if a promotion is added.”

When will the new policy be enforced?

Google will start the new price accuracy policy on April 6. From this day Google will be reviewing product feeds, data and landing pages to ensure that consumers are paying the price they are promised from the beginning to checkout. 

What will the penalty consist of?

If a merchant violates Google’s guidelines, they’ll receive an initial 28-day warning to resolve the price mismatches. Failure to comply will result in the suspension of the Merchant account at the end of the 28-day warning period.

How will it work? 

Google will be using the GoogleBot Shopping — A Google crawler able to add products to e-commerce site shopping carts, an automated system built to ensure the pricing seen on the product pages is the same as the price the appears in the user’s shopping cart.

What are the next steps?

If you own or manage an e-commerce website, we recommend you putting adequate checks in place to ensure price accuracy across your product feeds, merchant centre and landing pages.

When doing feed optimisation work, merchants will need to pay extra attention to all data input to ensure that prices comply with Google’s policy.

Contact us today and we’ll show you how to create fully optimised product feed in minutes. We offer a free 14-day trial after which you can decide whether you wish to stick with our software.