Suspended for shipping and returns information

This notice sounds like the easiest of them to fix, and that is what makes it frustrating. Merchants read it, find their returns page exactly where it has always been, and conclude the notice is wrong.

It usually is not wrong. It is pointing at something the merchant cannot see from inside their own shop, because they navigate it as someone who knows where everything is.

What the policy actually requires

Google requires that a shopper can find your return policy and your delivery terms before buying, that the information is accurate, and that it is consistent with what your account and your product data say. The requirement is not “a page exists”. It is that the answer a shopper gets is unambiguous.

Two consequences follow, and both are counter-intuitive:

1. Having the information twice can be worse than having it once. Two live pages that state different return windows do not average out to a correct answer. They read as a shop that does not know its own terms.
2. Where the information sits matters. A returns page that exists but is not reachable from the footer is, to a reviewer working through a checklist, functionally missing.

What usually lies behind it

These are classes of fault we have measured, anonymised. They are ordered by how often they turn out to be the actual cause rather than by how obvious they look.

Two policy pages, two different return windows

The most common one by a distance, and almost always a leftover. A theme change, a plugin migration or a translation round leaves the old page live at its old address while the new one is created somewhere else. Both are indexed. Both are reachable. They disagree.

Critical Policy pages check

Two live pages state different return windows

A reviewer checking whether your terms are clear finds two answers to the same question. Two answers read worse than none, because none is an omission and two is a contradiction.

Evidence

page A

14 days

page B

30 days

both

live, indexed, linked from different places

Neither page is wrong on its own. The finding is that both are reachable.

Illustrative — constructed to show the shape of the fault. The numbers are not from a measured run.

This is invisible from inside the shop because nobody navigates to both pages in the same session. It becomes obvious the moment someone lists every policy page in the shop side by side — which is what the check does.

Parallel duplicates across languages

The same fault, one layer up. A multilingual shop generates a policy page per language, and a later edit is applied to some of them. The reviewer reads the one in the market’s language; the merchant remembers editing the one in theirs.

One inventory across a single shop, on 17 August 2026, found 53 policy pages of various kinds. Nobody had put them there on purpose.

A return policy with no deadline at all

Less common, and usually a rewrite that softened the text: “returns accepted on unused items” without a number. To a shopper that is friendly. To a check that is looking for a stated period, it is a missing term.

The page exists but is not linked from the footer

A reviewer looks in the footer first, and so do most shoppers. A policy page that is reachable only from a checkout step or a help-centre search is present in a technical sense and absent in the sense that matters.

Shipping terms that live only inside checkout

Delivery cost and delivery time stated only after a shopper has added an item and entered an address. Common in shops where shipping is calculated, and genuinely hard to fix well — but the information has to be findable before the cart, not only inside it.

What the free Quick Scan can see of this

Measurable from outside, without any access:

• Every terms, returns, shipping, privacy and cookie page in the shop, found by slug pattern and by link text, across languages — including the ones the merchant has forgotten exist.
• Whether two of them contradict each other on the return window, stated as the two values side by side.
• Whether a return period is stated at all.
• Whether each page is reachable from the footer.
• Whether a policy page is in a different language than the page declares.

Not measurable from outside:

• What your Merchant Center account settings say about shipping and returns. Account-level return settings are configured inside the account, and they can disagree with your website — that comparison needs someone logged in.
• Whether a reviewer objected to the substance of your terms rather than to their clarity. That is a judgement, not a measurement.
• Whether checkout actually applies the terms the pages describe. We never fetch cart or checkout pages; a request there can create an order.

Findings in the second list come back as a checklist for you, each with what to check and why it matters, and are never counted as things we found.

How to narrow it down yourself

In this order, because each step is meaningless if the one before it failed:

1. Search your own domain for every page whose address contains returns, refund, shipping, delivery, terms, or their equivalents in each language you sell in. Do it logged out. Write down every address you find.
2. Open all of them at once and compare the return window in each. This is the step that finds the fault, and it is the step nobody does.
3. Check the footer on a product page, not the front page. Footers differ more often than people expect.
4. Compare the pages against your Merchant Center return settings. This is the one that needs you rather than us.
5. Then write the appeal, with the before state, what you changed, and the date you verified it.

What we do

We inventory every policy page in the shop, compare them against each other, and hand you the list with the contradictions marked and the policy clause each one breaches. Where the fix is editorial we give you the before and after text to approve. Where it is structural — a duplicate page that should return 404 — the recipe card includes how to verify it afterwards, logged out and after a cache purge.

The Quick Scan is free and is also our triage. If your case turns out to sit in the account rather than on the site, we would rather tell you that than sell you a careful measurement of something that was not the problem.