Fix Insufficient Contact Information in Merchant Center

The short version: Google requires shoppers to be able to reach a real business. Your site needs clearly visible contact information – at least two of a physical address, a phone number, and an email address – plus complete policy pages and a site that looks finished. "Website needs improvement" is the same trust check failing on site quality: placeholder content, broken pages, or a checkout that does not work.

1. What "insufficient contact information" actually checks

A reviewer (or the automated check) lands on your site and tries to answer one question: if something went wrong with an order, could a customer reach this business? A contact form alone does not answer it – forms can be black holes. Google expects at least two concrete contact methods published on the site: a physical business address, a phone number, or an email address. Put them on a dedicated contact page and in the footer, where shoppers and reviewers habitually look.

2. Make the details consistent everywhere

The business name, address, and phone number on your site must agree with what is in your Merchant Center account, your payment profile, and your domain registration where visible. Different spellings, an old address on the policy pages, or a phone number that appears nowhere else on the web all read as inconsistency – and inconsistency is what the trust check is hunting for.

3. What "website needs improvement" is flagging

This message means the site itself failed a quality pass. The recurring causes: placeholder or lorem-ipsum text still live, pages under construction, broken links and images, pop-ups that block content on arrival, a checkout that errors or cannot be completed, and sites that are little more than a landing page pointing elsewhere. Walk your own store end to end – browse, search, add to cart, check out as far as payment – and fix anything a stranger would find unfinished.

4. The policy pages are part of the check

Returns and refunds, shipping, privacy, and terms need to be real pages with real content: shipping timeframes and costs stated plainly, a return window and process a customer can follow, and no contradictions between the policy pages and the product pages. A shipping page that says "calculated at checkout" while product pages promise free delivery is exactly the kind of mismatch that keeps this warning alive.

5. Request the review properly

Fix everything first, then request review from the account issues section in Merchant Center. The review re-crawls the site, so give recent changes time to be live everywhere (clear CDN and page caches). If the issue returns, compare the feedback wording carefully – it usually narrows to one remaining gap. Fix that one thing rather than redesigning the site in a panic.

6. Keep it from coming back

Treat contact and policy pages as infrastructure, not decoration. When the business changes address, phone, or return terms, update the site, the Merchant Center account, and the policy pages in the same sitting. Most recurrences we see trace back to a change made in one place and forgotten in the others.

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Fix "Insufficient Contact Information" and "Website Needs Improvement" in Merchant Center