Existing Merchant Center Account - Website Claiming Check

Introduction/Business Impact

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If your merchant has an active Merchant Center account, there is a strong chance they have their website claimed already. If not, they will need to be able to verify and claim their website through your integration.

UX Guidance

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Existing Merchant Accounts - Website Claiming

Tech Guidance

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The account statuses websiteClaimed property will equal TRUE if the website is claimed or the account is exempted from the claim requirement.

Your platform should check the websiteClaimed property and the accounts websiteUrl property, and take the following steps:

websiteClaimed	websiteURL matches merchant's website on your platform	Your Next Step
FALSE	N/A	Verify and claim the website.
TRUE	TRUE	Proceed to the next step in on-boarding.
TRUE	FALSE	Prompt the user to create a new MC account or choose a different existing MC account that matches the website on your platform.

If your merchant needs to verify and claim their website, learn more about how to do this in the New Merchant Center Account Creation - Phone verification.

Note: Existing Merchant Center accounts configured to work with third-party CSSs are exempted from the website claim requirements. See the CSS compliance section for more information or reach out to your Google POC

Website is already claimed by another GMC account

It can happen that a website is claimed by an unknown MC account which prevents you from claiming the website. In this case we recommend:

• For existing Merchant Center accounts, If the website is already claimed by another MC account, ask the merchant to change the MC account to use the one with the claimed website.

• Ask your mechant to manually overwrite the claim in Merchant Center

• If the above is not possible, reach out to your Google POC

Tip: If your Merchant Center accounts use the same top domain and their landing pages are subdomains of the top domain, you can use accounts.custombatch to retrieve, claim, insert, update, and delete multiple accounts in a single request.

Warning: The claiming Merchant Center account may have a claim at a higher level, which covers uses at all lower levels, and so lower levels cannot be separately claimed. For example, a Merchant Center claiming http://example.com means that another Merchant Center cannot claim http://merchant.example.com, and a claim of http://marketplace.example.com means that http://marketplace.example.com/store cannot be separately claimed.

HTTP request: accounts.claimwebsite

POST https://shoppingcontent.googleapis.com/content/v2.1/{merchantId}/accounts/{accountId}/claimwebsite

Response: AccountsClaimWebsiteResponse