View the issues impacting a merchant account

Account issues affect your product visibility and your ability to participate in various Merchant Center programs. The Accounts sub-API lets you retrieve a list of issues impacting your merchant account. This helps you identify and address problems proactively.

You are responsible for complying with the Shopping ads and free listings policies. Google Shopping reserves the right to enforce these policies and respond appropriately if we find content or behavior that violates these policies.

Each AccountIssue provides details such as:

• title: A summary of the issue.
• severity: The severity of the issue. Examples include:
  • CRITICAL: An issue that causes offers to not serve.
  • ERROR: An issue that might affect offers or indicate a problem.
  • SUGGESTION: A recommendation for improvement.
• impactedDestinations: The programs (such as Shopping ads or free listings) and regions affected by the issue, along with the severity in those contexts.
• detail: A message with more context about the issue.
• documentationUri: A link to the Help Center article on how to resolve the issue.

Special considerations

• Internationalization (i18n): When listing account issues, you can specify a language_code (for example, "en-US", "fr-FR") and a time_zone (such as, "America/Los_Angeles", "Europe/Paris") in your request. This verify that human-readable strings in the response, such as the issue detail, are localized appropriately. If these fields are not provided, the API defaults to English ("en-US") and the "America/Los_Angeles" (Pacific Time) time zone.
• Pagination: The API supports pagination through page_size and page_token parameters in the ListAccountIssuesRequest. This lets you retrieve issues in manageable chunks. The maximum page_size is 1000, and the default is 50.
• Ordering: Issues returned by the API are generally ordered by severity and an internal priority, similar to the way that they are displayed in Merchant Center. Note that the API does not support custom sorting.
• Data source: The Accounts sub-API retrieves data from the same backend used by the diagnostics page in Merchant Center.

Retrieve issues for your account

To list account issues, send a GET request to the accounts.issues.list method:

GET https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1/accounts/{ACCOUNT_ID}/issues?language_code=en-GB&time_zone.id=Europe/London&page_size=10

Here's a sample response for a sub-account that was suspended for a "landing page not working" violation.

{
  "accountIssues": [
    {
      "name": "accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/issues/home-page-issue",
      "title": "Online store not confirmed",
      "severity": "CRITICAL",
      "impactedDestinations": [
        {
          "reportingContext": "SHOPPING_ADS",
          "impacts": [
            {
              "regionCode": "001",
              "severity": "CRITICAL"
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "detail": "The ownership of the online store must be verified through Merchant Center",
      "documentationUri": "https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/176793?hl=en-US"
    },
    {
      "name": "accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/issues/editorial-and-professional-standards-destination-url-down-policy",
      "title": "Landing page not working",
      "severity": "CRITICAL",
      "impactedDestinations": [
        {
          "reportingContext": "SHOPPING_ADS",
          "impacts": [
            {
              "regionCode": "ES",
              "severity": "CRITICAL"
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "reportingContext": "DEMAND_GEN_ADS",
          "impacts": [
            {
              "regionCode": "ES",
              "severity": "CRITICAL"
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "reportingContext": "VIDEO_ADS",
          "impacts": [
            {
              "regionCode": "ES",
              "severity": "CRITICAL"
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "detail": "Broken landing pages or broken links in your online store are not allowed",
      "documentationUri": "https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/12079604?hl=en-US"
    },
    {
      "name": "accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/issues/pending-phone-verification",
      "title": "Your phone number needs to be verified",
      "severity": "CRITICAL",
      "detail": "Verify your phone number to confirm your identity",
      "documentationUri": "https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/12471579?hl=en-US"
    },
    {
      "name": "accounts/ACCOUNT_ID/issues/pending-address-and-phone",
      "title": "Missing business address",
      "severity": "CRITICAL",
      "detail": "Provide a valid business address in Merchant Center",
      "documentationUri": "https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/12471579?hl=en-US"
    }
  ]
}

List account issues for a specific account

This use case shows how to retrieve all account-level issues for a given Merchant Center account. The information returned can help you identify and resolve problems affecting your account's performance and eligibility for various programs.

AppsScript

/**
 * Lists all issues for a given Merchant Center account.
 */
function listAccountIssues() {
  // IMPORTANT:
  // Enable the Merchant API Accounts sub-API Advanced Service and call it
  // "MerchantApiAccounts"

  // Replace this with your Merchant Center ID.
  const accountId = "<MERCHANT_CENTER_ID>";

  // Construct the parent name
  const parent = 'accounts/' + accountId;

  try {
    console.log('Sending list Account Issues request');
    // Set pageSize to the maximum value (default: 50)
    let pageSize = 100;
    let pageToken;
    let count = 0;
    // Call the Account.Issues.list API method. Use the pageToken to iterate
    // through all pages of results.
    do {
      response = MerchantApiAccounts.Accounts.Issues.list(parent, {pageSize, pageToken});
      for (const issue of response.accountIssues) {
        console.log(issue);
        count++;
      }
      pageToken = response.nextPageToken;
    } while (pageToken);  // Exits when there is no next page token.
    console.log('The following count of Account Issues were returned: ', count);
  } catch (e) {
    console.log('ERROR!');
    console.log(e);
  }
}
list_account_issues_sample.gs

Java

import com.google.api.gax.core.FixedCredentialsProvider;
import com.google.auth.oauth2.GoogleCredentials;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountIssue;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountIssueServiceClient;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountIssueServiceClient.ListAccountIssuesPagedResponse;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountIssueServiceSettings;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountName;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.ListAccountIssuesRequest;
import shopping.merchant.samples.utils.Authenticator;
import shopping.merchant.samples.utils.Config;

/**
 * This class demonstrates how to list all the account issues of an account.
 *
 * <p>If you want to query the account issues of all the sub-accounts of an advanced account, see
 * ListAdvancedAccountIssuesSampleAsync.
 */
public class ListAccountIssuesSample {

  public static void listAccountIssues(Config config) throws Exception {

    // Obtains OAuth token based on the user's configuration.
    GoogleCredentials credential = new Authenticator().authenticate();

    // Creates service settings using the credentials retrieved above.
    AccountIssueServiceSettings accountIssueServiceSettings =
        AccountIssueServiceSettings.newBuilder()
            .setCredentialsProvider(FixedCredentialsProvider.create(credential))
            .build();

    // Calls the API and catches and prints any network failures/errors.
    try (AccountIssueServiceClient accountIssueServiceClient =
        AccountIssueServiceClient.create(accountIssueServiceSettings)) {

      // Gets the account ID from the config file.
      String accountId = config.getAccountId().toString();

      // Creates account name to identify account.
      String name = AccountName.newBuilder().setAccount(accountId).build().toString();
      ListAccountIssuesRequest request =
          ListAccountIssuesRequest.newBuilder().setParent(name).build();

      System.out.println("Sending list account issues request:");
      ListAccountIssuesPagedResponse response =
          accountIssueServiceClient.listAccountIssues(request);

      int count = 0;

      // Iterates over all rows in all pages and prints the issue in each row.
      // Automatically uses the `nextPageToken` if returned to fetch all pages of data.
      for (AccountIssue accountIssue : response.iterateAll()) {
        System.out.println(accountIssue);
        count++;
      }
      System.out.print("The following count of account issues were returned: ");
      System.out.println(count);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println("An error has occured: ");
      System.out.println(e);
    }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Config config = Config.load();
    listAccountIssues(config);
  }
}
ListAccountIssuesSample.java

PHP

use Google\ApiCore\ApiException;
use Google\Shopping\Merchant\Accounts\V1\Client\AccountIssueServiceClient;
use Google\Shopping\Merchant\Accounts\V1\ListAccountIssuesRequest;

/**
 * Lists all the account issues of an account.
 */
class ListAccountIssues
{
    /**
     * A helper function to create the parent string.
     *
     * @param array $accountId
     *      The account.
     *
     * @return string The parent has the format: `accounts/{account_id}`
     */
    private static function getParent($accountId)
    {
        return sprintf("accounts/%s", $accountId);
    }

    /**
     * Lists all the account issues for a given Merchant Center account.
     *
     * @param array $config
     *      The configuration data used for authentication and getting the acccount ID.
     * @return void
     */
    public static function listAccountIssuesSample($config): void
    {
        // Gets the OAuth credentials.
        $credentials = Authentication::useServiceAccountOrTokenFile();

        // Creates options config.
        $options = ['credentials' => $credentials];

        // Creates a client.
        $accountIssueServiceClient = new AccountIssueServiceClient($options);

        // Creates parent.
        $parent = self::getParent($config['accountId']);

        // Creates the request.
        $request = new ListAccountIssuesRequest(['parent' => $parent]);

        // Calls the API and catches and prints any network failures/errors.
        try {
            print "Sending list account issues request:\n";
            $response = $accountIssueServiceClient->listAccountIssues($request);

            $count = 0;
            // Iterates over all elements and prints the issue in each row.
            foreach ($response->iterateAllElements() as $accountIssue) {
                print_r($accountIssue);
                $count++;
            }
            print "The following count of account issues were returned: ";
            print $count . "\n";
        } catch (ApiException $e) {
            print "An error has occured: \n";
            print $e->getMessage() . "\n";
        }
    }

    /**
     * Helper to execute the sample.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function callSample(): void
    {
        $config = Config::generateConfig();

        // Lists the account issues.
        self::listAccountIssuesSample($config);
    }
}

// Run the script
$sample = new ListAccountIssues();
$sample->callSample();
ListAccountIssuesSample.php

Python

from examples.authentication import configuration
from examples.authentication import generate_user_credentials
from google.shopping.merchant_accounts_v1 import AccountIssueServiceClient
from google.shopping.merchant_accounts_v1 import ListAccountIssuesRequest

_ACCOUNT = configuration.Configuration().read_merchant_info()
_PARENT = f"accounts/{_ACCOUNT}"


def list_account_issues():
  """Lists all the account issues of an account."""

  # Gets OAuth Credentials.
  credentials = generate_user_credentials.main()

  # Creates a client.
  client = AccountIssueServiceClient(credentials=credentials)

  request = ListAccountIssuesRequest(parent=_PARENT)

  print("Sending list account issues request:")

  # Makes the request and catches and prints any error messages.
  try:
    response = client.list_account_issues(request=request)
    count = 0

    for account_issue in response:
      print(account_issue)
      count += 1
    print("The following count of account issues were returned: ")
    print(count)

  except RuntimeError as e:
    print("An error has occured: ")
    print(e)


if __name__ == "__main__":
  list_account_issues()
list_account_issues_sample.py

cURL

curl -X GET \
"https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1/accounts/{ACCOUNT_ID}/issues?language_code=en-US&time_zone.id=America/Los_Angeles&page_size=50" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN}" \
--header "Accept: application/json"

List account issues for all sub-accounts of an advanced account

If you manage an advanced account, you might need to check for issues across all your sub-accounts. This example demonstrates how to list sub-accounts and then, for each sub-account, asynchronously retrieve its account issues. This approach is efficient for handling multiple accounts.

Java

import static com.google.api.core.ApiFutures.transform;

import com.google.api.core.ApiFuture;
import com.google.api.core.ApiFutureCallback;
import com.google.api.core.ApiFutures;
import com.google.api.gax.core.FixedCredentialsProvider;
import com.google.auth.oauth2.GoogleCredentials;
import com.google.common.util.concurrent.MoreExecutors;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountIssueServiceClient;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountIssueServiceSettings;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountName;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountsServiceClient;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountsServiceClient.ListSubAccountsPagedResponse;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.AccountsServiceSettings;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.ListAccountIssuesRequest;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.ListAccountIssuesResponse;
import com.google.shopping.merchant.accounts.v1.ListSubAccountsRequest;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.AbstractMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Map.Entry;
import java.util.concurrent.Executor;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;
import java.util.stream.StreamSupport;
import shopping.merchant.samples.utils.Authenticator;
import shopping.merchant.samples.utils.Config;

/**
 * This class demonstrates how to list the account issues of all the sub-accounts of an advanced
 * account.
 */
public class ListAdvancedAccountIssuesAsyncSample {

  /** Returns the list of issues for the given account. */
  private static ApiFuture<ListAccountIssuesResponse> getAccountIssues(
      AccountIssueServiceClient accountIssueServiceClient, String account) {
    return accountIssueServiceClient
        .listAccountIssuesCallable()
        .futureCall(ListAccountIssuesRequest.newBuilder().setParent(account).build());
  }

  /**
   * Returns a map of account issues where key is the sub-account resource name and the value is the
   * list of issues for each sub-account. Takes the API clients and the name of the advanced account
   * as input.
   */
  private static ApiFuture<Map<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse>> getSubAccountIssues(
      AccountsServiceClient accountsServiceClient,
      AccountIssueServiceClient accountIssueServiceClient,
      String advancedAccount)
      throws IOException {

    // Creates a direct executor to run the transform functions.
    Executor executor = MoreExecutors.directExecutor();

    // The parent has the format: accounts/{account}
    ListSubAccountsRequest request =
        ListSubAccountsRequest.newBuilder().setProvider(advancedAccount).build();
    System.out.println("Sending list subaccounts request:");

    // Lists all sub-accounts of the advanced account.
    ListSubAccountsPagedResponse listSubAccountsResponse =
        accountsServiceClient.listSubAccounts(request);

    // Iterates over all subAccounts and lists account issues for each.
    // Automatically uses the `nextPageToken` if returned to fetch all pages of data.
    List<ApiFuture<AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse>>>
        accountIssuesFutures =
            StreamSupport.stream(listSubAccountsResponse.iterateAll().spliterator(), false)
                .map(
                    account ->
                        transform(
                            getAccountIssues(accountIssueServiceClient, account.getName()),
                            (ListAccountIssuesResponse response) ->
                                new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>(account.getName(), response),
                            executor))
                .collect(Collectors.toList());

    // Collects all the responses into a single future.
    ApiFuture<List<AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse>>> accountIssuesList =
        ApiFutures.allAsList(accountIssuesFutures);

    // Transforms the list of responses into a map.
    return transform(
        accountIssuesList,
        (List<AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse>> list) ->
            list.stream()
                .collect(
                    Collectors.toMap(
                        AbstractMap.SimpleEntry::getKey,
                        AbstractMap.SimpleEntry::getValue,
                        (a, b) -> a)),
        executor);
  }

  public static void listAccountIssues(Config config) throws Exception {

    // Obtains OAuth token based on the user's configuration.
    GoogleCredentials credential = new Authenticator().authenticate();

    // Gets the account ID from the config file.
    // Make sure to use the advanced account ID here, otherwise the API will return an error.
    String accountId = config.getAccountId().toString();

    // Creates account name to identify account.
    String parent = AccountName.newBuilder().setAccount(accountId).build().toString();

    // Creates service settings using the credentials retrieved above.
    AccountsServiceSettings accountsServiceSettings =
        AccountsServiceSettings.newBuilder()
            .setCredentialsProvider(FixedCredentialsProvider.create(credential))
            .build();

    // Creates service settings using the credentials retrieved above.
    AccountIssueServiceSettings accountIssueServiceSettings =
        AccountIssueServiceSettings.newBuilder()
            .setCredentialsProvider(FixedCredentialsProvider.create(credential))
            .build();

    // Calls the API and catches and prints any network failures/errors.
    try (AccountsServiceClient accountsServiceClient =
            AccountsServiceClient.create(accountsServiceSettings);
        AccountIssueServiceClient accountIssueServiceClient =
            AccountIssueServiceClient.create(accountIssueServiceSettings)) {

      ApiFuture<Map<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse>> subAccountIssues =
          getSubAccountIssues(accountsServiceClient, accountIssueServiceClient, parent);

      ApiFutures.addCallback(
          subAccountIssues,
          new ApiFutureCallback<Map<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse>>() {
            @Override
            public void onSuccess(Map<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse> results) {
              System.out.println("Account Issues");
              for (Entry<String, ListAccountIssuesResponse> entry : results.entrySet()) {
                System.out.println("Issues for account " + entry.getKey());
                System.out.println(entry.getValue());
              }
            }

            @Override
            public void onFailure(Throwable throwable) {
              System.out.println(throwable);
            }
          },
          MoreExecutors.directExecutor());
    } catch (Exception e) {
      System.out.println("An error has occured: ");
      System.out.println(e);
    }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Config config = Config.load();
    listAccountIssues(config);
  }
}
ListAdvancedAccountIssuesAsyncSample.java

cURL

To list issues for sub-accounts of an advanced account, you would first list the sub-accounts (e.g., using accounts.listSubaccounts) and then iterate through each sub-account ID to call the accounts.issues.list method. The following curl example shows how to list issues for a single sub-account. Repeat this request for each sub-account ID.

 curl -X GET \
 "https://merchantapi.googleapis.com/accounts/v1/accounts/{SUB_ACCOUNT_ID}/issues?language_code=en-US&time_zone.id=America/Los_Angeles&page_size=50" \
 --header "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN}" \
 --header "Accept: application/json"
 ```