Soooo back in March of 2011 Google told merchant center account holders that they needed to enter their tax and shipping rates or be denied. They originally stated that merchant must include this data by June 6th 2011. Google than delayed the enforcement of this requirement until September 1st 2011.
In typical Google style however, they never actually began enforcing this requirement.
This led to a lot of controversy about how the law abiding merchants were losing out to the merchants who did not pay heed to Google’s threat (and therefore their listing prices were generally less than those merchants who’s listings included the addition tax and shipping costs). You can read a good article about it here.
Well six months after the second stated deadline, Google decided that it may start actually enforcing said requirement.
Google has begun warning merchants who are currently not complying with this requirement.
The warning looks like this:
Will Google actually follow through this time? That is yet to be seen. If you have a very complicated shipping method or will need to assign a flat rate value per items than it might not be a bad idea to start working on having this information ready to go in case they do actual flip the switch this time.
If you run into any issues or just need to talk to someone about setting up your tax and shipping policies, I’m always here to help!
Always questioning Google,
CSE.Manager
