“Website needs improvement” in Merchant Center: what to fix

What the status means

Merchant Center Help groups “Website needs improvement” with Misrepresentation and gives them the same remedy: conduct a website audit and verify consistent business information, clear policy links, and site functionality.

So this is not a comment on your theme, your photography or your conversion rate. It is Google saying it could not verify the storefront against that list.

The three items, in the order worth fixing

Work identity first, because it is the cheapest to verify and the easiest to get wrong: legal business name, physical address, phone and email on the site, matching the Merchant Center account exactly.

Then policies — shipping, refund and privacy, explicitly linked, with the actual terms filled in. Then functionality — no 404s, no homepage bounces, checkout reachable and on HTTPS.

• Identity: the same four fields on the storefront and in the account.
• Policies: three links, real terms, reachable from any page.
• Functionality: every submitted URL resolves; checkout works over HTTPS.

Google names the policy, not the line item

The notice tells you which policy was applied. It does not tell you that your return window is missing or that eleven collection URLs 404. That is why the instruction is to audit all three items rather than guess at one.

It is also why the expensive resource is the review attempt, not the fix. Passing the whole list once beats appealing three times on partial work.

How a storefront scan fits

GMC Scout crawls the live Shopify storefront and runs 70+ checks that map onto those three items: contact and identity fields, each policy plus the specific terms on it, HTTPS, and an HTTP status check on every URL it finds.

A free scan counts and categorises what it finds; unlocking the report names each issue with evidence and the affected URLs. A clean report is not a promise of reinstatement — feed attributes, account verification, ad history and payment processing are off-site.

FAQ

Related guides

• GMC misrepresentation: what Google actually checks
• What Google reviewers check on a misrepresentation appeal
• HTTPS and a working checkout: Google’s third website audit item