Google Merchant Security Woes

We were greeted the other morning by a forwarded Google email from a ecommerce merchant, with the subject “Suspension Warning of Your Merchant Center Account”.

It stated they were in violation of not having an available landing pages for products.  We checked the system and all of the landing pages were working and everything was working.

The merchant is US based and blocks any NON-US based countries from having access to the website.  We did notice in the firewall that there were several attempts from a blocked country to attempt access at some of the product pages.

The marketing team reached out to Google support and they were told that the website has to be available to everyone.  We thought that had to be a mistake, so we reached out directly to the Google representative of the merchant. 

I explained that in 2021 NO merchant should have to have their entire website exposed to countries notorious for bot attacks, hacks and denial of service.  We requested the review take place in the US, which is both the country the merchant ONLY does business in and where Google is located.

The Google representative did an amazing job, but unfortunately their hands were tied by bureaucratic red tape.  Despite being an absolute security nightmare, the official policy is that “the website needs to be accessible everywhere and that the policy is the same for all merchants.  They outlined that changes will need to be made with a new review requested. While I pushed back, they mentioned that the policy cannot be changed and that an exception cannot be made.”

Merchants have little recourse but allowing their websites to be completely exposed to all sorts of nefarious traffic but for that one review day.  In 2021, this is totally unacceptable.