1.6 Policy Check
Introduction/Business Impact
Merchants not only need to meet the account requirements for Free Listing and Paid Ads, they need to meet the Merchant Center website requirements. Learn more about the Merchant Center Website Requirements.
Because of these website requirements, we want to have a step in the onboarding process where merchants are aware of these requirements and be able to fix them if needed.
UX Guidance
This is an example where a system auto-detects the status of the five Google online store requirements and surfaces it on UIs. Ideally, the storebuilder will help the merchants complete all the website requirements upstream. Otherwise, the storebuilder will provide the merchants with direct access to complete all the requirements during onboarding.
We also provide the option for merchants to skip this step during onboarding and complete it later. Then we guide merchants to complete the online store requirements post-onboarding.
We highly recommend using contextual or overlay pages to reduce redirects. Merchants can easily get lost while navigating between Google plug-in and store builder pages, which increases the churn rate.
Tech Guidance
Present the following Merchant Center website requirements to the merchant so they can confirm their website meets the requirements:
- Ensure the site is not password protected and accessible to customers
- Add a Refund and Terms of service
- Add a store contact method
- Set up secure checkout and complete checkout
- Confirm your store URL begins with https://
Recommended implementation
Auto detection: We recommend building an automated which auto-detects the status of the 5 Google online store requirements and surfaces it on UIs.
Ease of making updates to requirements which are not met: if there changes need to be made to meet the website requirements, These steps should link to functionality in the platform where merchants can update this information to make sure it is included on their website.
Minimal implementation
If you can't build an automated system which auto-detects or make it simple for merchants to make edits, then we recommend showing the 5 website requirements and forcing the merchant to manually click on checkboxes so they are aware of these requirements.
Keep in mind, this implementation method could cause a lot of account suspensions for not meeting our website requirements. This could cause merchants to easily give up and no longer try to fix the issue to continue onboarding.