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Understand and resolve account suspension, product data disapprovals, and item disapprovals
Google has created a set of policies to ensure a positive and safe experience using Google and their partner sites. As a merchant, you must adhere to these policies. If you don’t, your items might be disapproved — you will then know that there is a problem. Continued policy violations can result in suspended accounts.
Read this article to dive into account-level, product data-level, and item-level violations. You will then be up to date on this topic and less likely to break any of Google’s rules.
Account level
When you first upload items to your account, your items and website will be reviewed to ensure they meet the Google Shopping ads policy requirements. Your products can show as “Pending” on the Diagnostics page for up to 3 business days.
A successful review will find that your products and website comply with the Shopping ads policies — your products will then be eligible for Google Shopping ads. If your products and website do not comply with the Shopping ads policies, you will face immediate account suspension and will receive a notification email with details.
Warning email
After this first account review, your Merchant Center account will be reviewed regularly for compliance issues. Let’s suppose your website or products are not in compliance with Google’s Shopping ads policies. In that case, you will receive a warning email with more details about the issue and how to fix it. You will be given a warning period in which you can still resolve your issues before account suspension.
Account suspension
If the issues are not fixed before the end of the warning period, all your products will be disabled from Shopping ads and your account will be suspended. You will receive emails with detailed information about your account suspension and the Shopping ads policy violations that were detected.
Requesting review
After an account suspension, you can fix the problems and request an account review. If your issues have been resolved, your account suspension will be lifted. If your issues have still not been resolved, you can request a second review. If your issues are not resolved after the second review, you will receive a one-week cool-down period in which you cannot request another review. Your account will remain suspended during this period.
You can find the Request review button in your Merchant Center account. Navigate to Products, and click Diagnostics. Next, click on the Account issues tab. Click Request review for the account-level issue you would like to have reviewed.
An email will be sent to you once the review has been completed. This can take up to 7 days.
Product data level
Products may be disapproved when the data you provide does not comply with Google’s product data specifications or does not match the product information on your website. Products that are disapproved will not show up in Shopping ads and free listings.
Review
To show your disapproved products in Shopping ads and free listings again, you need to review your disapproved products and make corrections to ensure you resubmit accurate product data.
To update your disapproved products, review the Item issues tab on the Diagnostics page in your Merchant Center account. With Learn more, you can view specific steps to fix the issue.
It can take up to 12 hours after you have updated the disapproved products to verify whether the data issue has been resolved.
Product warnings
Product warnings tell you there is an issue limiting the performance of your Shopping ads and free listings. They also let you know about issues that may lead to product or account suspension in the future if the issues are not resolved.
If your products miss required product identifiers (UPIs) — such as MPN, GTIN, or brand — they will continue to show in Shopping ads and free listings, but their performance may fall short. Similar products from competitors will receive higher priority than yours. Always make sure you provide correct UPIs to maximize your product performance. You can read more about this at Google’s Help Center page.
Item level
Google can disapprove individual items or your entire Merchant Center if they find submitted items that do not comply with Google’s policies. You can view your disapproved items in the Merchant Center under Items issues in the Diagnostics section. It is also possible to download a CSV file containing all affected items for a particular issue.
As with product-data violations, you can request a review when you have corrected your item-level violations. In some cases, you can request a manual review of an individual item that was automatically disapproved for policy violations. This manual review can take up to 3 business days to complete and is only available for select policy violations.
Best practices regarding suspension issues
When you receive a suspension warning, contact Shoparize CSS if we are your CSS partner (or contact your CSS partner if you don’t work with us yet). Shoparize will contact the Google Premium CSS support team to identify and fix the issue with them. We will make sure the suspension warning is lifted and request a review for you.
If your account is suspended, contact Shoparize before you request a review. If you request a review, you can’t revert that request, and you risk a one-week cool-down period in which you can’t request a second review — during that period, your account will remain suspended. To prevent this, contact Shoparize first so we can follow Google’s Premium CSS support team’s best practices and fix the issues. Only after we have made sure the issues are fixed will we request a review. That way, we ensure minimal revenue loss for our merchants.
We hope this article has been helpful. If you would like to know how Shoparize can help you prevent suspension issues and optimize your product data accordingly, send us an email today at css@shoparize.com.
