If your manually added shipping policies keep disappearing from Google Merchant Center, switch the Google & YouTube app’s shipping information to manual. That one setting stops the app from replacing your policies with its own.
Why your shipping settings keep disappearing
Many Shopify merchants combine two kinds of shipping rules: the native Shopify shipping settings, and custom rules from a third-party shipping app. The Google & YouTube app can only read the native settings. It cannot send rules from a third-party shipping app to Merchant Center.
The workaround is to add those shipping policies yourself in Merchant Center. The catch is that they won’t stay there while automatic shipping is enabled in the Google & YouTube app. The app pushes its own shipping policies and your manual ones are removed.
The fix takes two steps: turn off automatic shipping in the app, then replace the app’s policies with your own.
Step 1: Switch shipping to manual in the Google & YouTube app
- In your Shopify admin, open Sales channels.
- Select Google & YouTube.
- Open Settings.
- Scroll down to the Product feed section on the left.
- Find Shipping information.
- Select Manually set up shipping information in Google Merchant Center.
The app now stops sending shipping policies to Merchant Center. Shipping rates become your job to maintain there.
Step 2: Replace the app’s policies in Merchant Center
- In Google Merchant Center, go to Products and store.
- Select Shipping and returns.
- Find the shipping policies listed as coming from the Google & YouTube app, and delete them.
- Add your own shipping policies, matching the rates from your third-party shipping app.
With automatic shipping turned off, your manually added policies stay in place and are no longer removed.
The limitation: third-party shipping can’t sync automatically
At the time of writing, you can’t send third-party shipping settings from Shopify to Merchant Center. The Google & YouTube app simply can’t read that data, so manual setup in Merchant Center is the only route.
If automatic syncing matters to you, contact the company behind your shipping app. Ask them to build an API integration that submits shipping information to Merchant Center. They can build it if they choose to, and how likely that is depends on how many merchants ask.