MerchantMend

· 5 min read

Merchant Center price mismatch caused by tax and Markets settings on Shopify

When Merchant Center price mismatches are off by the tax rate, Shopify tax display and Markets settings are the likely cause. Here is what to check and change.

The short answer

If every flagged product is off by the same percentage, your tax settings are the likely cause. Google wants tax-inclusive prices in most countries and tax-exclusive prices in the US and Canada. Shopify can show different prices to different visitors based on where they are, so Google's crawler may see a price your feed doesn't send. Check what your target country's visitors see, and make the feed match it.

What Google expects

Google's price attribute rules split by country:

The same page says to submit an amount and currency that match the landing page and checkout, and to show the target country's currency prominently. Google's mismatched price article adds that crawlers may see different prices or currencies than shoppers do, which is the core of this problem.

The Shopify settings involved

This is not tax advice. It only describes what the settings do. Talk to an accountant about what you should charge.

Include tax in prices

In Settings > Taxes and duties, Shopify has a setting called "Include sales tax in product price and shipping rate", according to Shopify's tax-inclusive pricing guide. With it on, your product prices already contain tax. Shopify also says to keep "Charge tax on this product" selected on each product, so the tax shows in the displayed price.

If you sell to the UK or EU and this is off, your store shows prices before VAT while Google expects prices with VAT. If you sell to the US and it is on, the reverse can happen.

Dynamic tax display in Markets

Shopify's dynamic tax-inclusive pricing includes or excludes tax "based on your customer's region". You turn it on per market: go to Markets, open a market, open its tax settings, and in the Tax display menu select Dynamic tax display.

Shopify's example: a $100 product from a store with a 20% home tax rate sells for $109.09 to a UK customer. For countries outside Shopify's tax-inclusive list, prices show without tax and tax is added at checkout. Shopify also says product pages and the cart may not show the adjusted price correctly unless you sell in local currencies with Shopify Payments or the visitor meets certain cookie and browser conditions. That last point matters here. Googlebot is not a normal visitor.

What merchants report

The longest Shopify Community thread on tax-driven mismatches describes UK and EU stores using the "Include or exclude tax based on your customer's country" option. Their feeds sent VAT-inclusive prices, Google's crawler sometimes saw ex-VAT prices, and products got automatic price updates or were rejected. One reply put it bluntly: "IP based price modification is not allowed if you want to use Google Shopping."

Fixes tried in that thread had mixed results:

How to check your store

  1. Pick one flagged product and one target country.
  2. Note the price and currency your feed sends. In Merchant Center, open the product from Products > Needs attention.
  3. Open the product page in a private window, with no cookies, and note the price. If you can, use a VPN location in the target country and again from a different country.
  4. Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test and read the price in the structured data.
  5. Divide the two prices. If the ratio equals a tax rate, such as 1.20 for 20% VAT, you have found the cause.

Ways to fix it

Whatever you choose, test with the steps above before you request a recheck. Google says products are reapproved once a recrawl finds matching prices. At the time of writing (November 2026), these setting names match Shopify's and Google's help pages, but both admins change often.

If the mismatch hits only some variants and the gap is not a tax rate, read the variant price mismatch guide instead.