Fix a Suspended Merchant Center Account

An item-level disapproval takes a single product offline for a data-quality reason; the rest of the account keeps serving. A suspension is account-level: every product stops appearing across Shopping ads and free listings at once, and the account itself is flagged. Because the whole account is down, a suspension is a revenue emergency, and Google treats the bar for getting back in higher — reinstatement happens "only in compelling circumstances, and when there’s good reason." Treat the suspension email as the start of a careful remediation project, not a quick feed edit.

For most policy issues Google issues a warning first — an email plus a banner on the Diagnostics / Needs attention page — with 7 or 28 calendar days to fix it. If you remove the violating products during the warning window, the account is reviewed automatically at the end with no further action. If the window lapses unresolved, the account is suspended. For egregious violations (misrepresentation is the headline example), there is no warning: the account is suspended on detection. So whether you get a runway depends entirely on which policy was triggered.

Don’t guess. The suspension email names the policy; the Merchant Center Home and Diagnostics pages show the account-level issue in a banner and in the "Needs attention" summary cards. Read the precise policy name (e.g. "Misrepresentation", "Missing return and refund policy", "Insufficient contact information") — the fix is entirely different per reason, and requesting a review against the wrong fix wastes a 7-day cycle and risks the cool-down. Capture the full email text and any example URLs Google cites; account messages are only stored temporarily, and the specific examples are the fastest route to the real root cause. If several issues are listed, treat the policy/misrepresentation one as primary — it is the gate to reinstatement.

Shoppers must be able to reach you in at least one clear way — a contact form, a business profile/social link, an email, or a phone number — and it should match your Merchant Center settings. "Insufficient contact information" is one of the most common suspension reasons and one of the easiest to fix: add a visible Contact page and make sure the business name, address, phone, and email on the site agree with what’s in Merchant Center.

A missing, unclear, or hard-to-find return-and-refund policy is a frequent trigger. State plainly how returns and refunds work, including requirements and timelines; if you don’t accept returns, say so explicitly. The policy must be genuinely discoverable (linked in the footer/checkout), not buried — and you must actually honour it, because denying a refund that your stated policy allows is itself a misrepresentation violation.

Describe what your company does (an "About us" page), use your own name, logo, images, and colours, and be explicit about any brand partnerships. Then make the hard data agree everywhere: the prices, availability, and product attributes in your feed must match your website exactly — a stale feed price or an "in stock" item that’s sold out on the site reads as misrepresentation. This feed-vs-site consistency is the overlap between a clean feed and an un-suspended account.

Google runs a separate Healthcare & medicines policy on top of the general program policies, and it is one of the most common reasons stores selling supplements, vitamins, over-the-counter medication, or pharmacy products get blocked. The policy restricts over-the-counter medication, prescription drugs, unapproved pharmaceuticals and supplements, and pregnancy- and fertility-related products. Some of it — unapproved supplements above all — cannot be listed anywhere, regardless of any claim of legality. Specific prohibitions include products containing ephedra, hCG marketed for weight loss, herbal supplements with active pharmaceutical or dangerous ingredients, anything making false or misleading health claims, and products named confusingly close to a prescription drug or anabolic steroid. Enforcement starts at the item level as a disapproval, but Google states that repeated or egregious violations can escalate to an account-level ban — which is the emergency this guide covers.

Whether you may list at all is country-specific. In the United States, approved over-the-counter medication is allowed without certification, but prescription drugs and pharmacy listings require certification: the merchant must be accredited by the LegitScript Healthcare Merchant Certification program (or the NABP VIPPS / .pharmacy Verified Websites program) and separately certified by Google via the online-pharmacy application. In many other countries, over-the-counter drugs may only be listed by registered online pharmacies that are also Google-certified; where no certification path exists for a country, those products cannot be listed there at all. The practical takeaway: check the Healthcare & medicines policy for every country you target, confirm you hold the required accreditation and Google certification before you upload, and remove products you are not certified to sell rather than risk an account-level block.

A single restricted product usually triggers an item-level disapproval with a reason like “Unapproved pharmaceuticals and supplements” — fix or remove that product and the rest of the account keeps serving. A pattern of restricted listings, or one egregious offer, can instead block the whole account under Healthcare & medicines. Read the exact wording in the email and the Merchant Center Diagnostics banner: a product-level reason names the offending item, while an account-level message references the policy and stops every product at once. Paste a product-level reason into the free disapproval diagnostic to get its cause and fix; for an account block, the recovery loop is the same fix → verify → request-review workflow below, with the added first step of removing or certifying every restricted offer.

You get a limited number of review requests before a cool-down period kicks in. During cool-down the "Request review" button is greyed out and the account stays suspended; each unsuccessful review can lengthen the next cool-down. You can see the cool-down end date under Products → Needs attention → "View setup and policy issues". Use the cool-down to actually fix things — not to wait it out and re-submit the same unresolved account.

The most damaging "fix" is deleting the suspended account and creating a fresh one for the same business. Google explicitly warns against it: deleting doesn’t clear the suspension, and the new account gets re-flagged because the underlying signals (website, identity, linked accounts) are the same. Recreating also wastes setup and can compound the problem. Fix the original account instead.

A large share of suspensions and "unavailable offer" misrepresentation flags come from the feed and the website disagreeing — a price that moved, an item sold out on the site but "in stock" in the feed, attributes that don’t match. Feed validation at import catches these drifts before they reach Merchant Center, and driving the feed from a single source of truth that regenerates on change keeps price and availability honest across surfaces. That removes the data-side causes of a misrepresentation suspension. Try this on the Google Shopping channel.

Be clear about scope: the transparency and policy causes — contact info, a clear return/refund policy, an honest About page, brand-partnership disclosures, and Identity Verification — live on your website and business setup, not in the feed. No feed tool, FeedArc included, can write your refund policy or complete your IDV. The durable approach pairs honest, transparent site setup with a consistent, validated feed so neither layer triggers enforcement — the feed half is checkable before every upload with the free feed validator.