Google Trusted Store Feeds – The Moving Lines

Update 10/24/13:

We just heard back from our support person that we should be notified when the badge has an issue. We never received any confirmation or contact from them. In anycase, they did point us to the actual test tool in an obscure post on a Q/A page (Test Drive tool here).

We recently wrote about (source the difficulties we faced while setting up Google Trusted Store Feeds with Magento shopping cart.

Now we face a new challenge, trying to find out why a Trusted Store badge mysteriously disappeared. Thankfully, Google’s Trusted Merchant support folks are very responsive and an awesome group of folks. They were able to point us to the fact that our checkout success page has been incorrectly formatted.

This came as a shock, since this page had been in place close to a year with the exact same variables. It turns out that either Google has made some of the formatting requirements tighter or they’ve changed the requirements completely.

One example:

 <span id="gts-o-domain">{www.domain.com}</span>

We had always had the domain name hardcoded with curly brackets. Apparently this now fails formatting, but our client was never informed about this. Also, all of your currency variables MUST be restricted to two decimal places. Magento always provides three. (PHP snippet on correct format).

 echo number_format($in,2,'.','')

Google’s Trusted Merchant support has a tool called “Test Drive” which crawls your site and brings up a list of errors/formatting issues. Unfortunately this tool is not released to the public so we have to work with Google to correct any feed issues that they detect.

What was interesting, is that the badge disappeared right around the start of October. While reviewing the Trusted Store guidelines again, we found that they had just updated their Guidelines on 9/21/2013 ( Here). So we believe that this update to the page had somehow been linked to stricter or changed requirements for the Google Trusted Merchant reporting code.

Since there is no way of knowing when changes are made to the guidelines, we advise clients keep a close eye on both the Google Guidelines as well as their store badge.

Google, please please please release the “Test Drive” system to the public. You have incredibly complicated reporting requirements for all of your services (Analytic, Shopping Product Feeds, Trusted Merchant Feeds, Adword Reporting). This tool would save both time and money for you and our clients!

Also, can you please just provide a newsletter or very simple blog, letting us know when basic changes are made to your services that may affect our reporting guidelines. A very simple high level update would suffice. ie. “New Merchant Guidelines going in affect in X days. Click Here for for information.”

We really like Google’s reporting and Ad tools, but sometimes the lack of transparency or even clarity with guidelines proves to be difficult.