Inaccurate shipping costs
What causes the "Inaccurate shipping costs" error in Merchant Center and how to fix it.
This error means the shipping rate Google has on file is lower than what customers are actually charged at checkout. Fix it by matching your account-level shipping settings (or the shipping attribute) to your real checkout rates.
What triggers it
"Inaccurate shipping costs" fires when Google's crawl or account settings say shipping is cheaper than what a shopper is actually charged at your checkout. It's the shipping equivalent of a price mismatch: Google expects what it shows to match what you charge, and a gap, even a small one, is enough to trigger the flag.
The usual cause is drift rather than deliberate misconfiguration: a courier rate changed, a free-shipping threshold moved, or a feed-level shipping attribute was left in place after the account settings were updated, so the two now disagree.
How /tools helps
Shipping is configured in your store and Merchant Center account rather than by enrichment, but the feed's shipping-related attributes are checked for contradictions against account settings as part of your feed health checks, catching a stale override before it costs you a disapproval.
Step by step
- Check what your checkout actually charges. Run a real test order for a few affected products, including different regions if you ship internationally, and note the exact shipping cost the customer pays.
- Compare it to Merchant Center's shipping settings. Look at your account-level shipping rules first (flat rate, free threshold, carrier-calculated), then check for any feed-level shipping attribute on the affected products.
- Correct whichever one is wrong. Usually the account settings are stale after a courier or pricing change. Update them, or remove a feed-level override that no longer reflects reality.
- Re-check after the next crawl. Merchant Center re-verifies shipping periodically, so give it a normal crawl cycle before assuming the fix hasn't landed.