Missing shipping costs
What causes the "Missing shipping costs" error in Merchant Center and how to fix it.
This error means Google can't find a shipping cost for the product at all, either at account level or in the feed. Fix it by setting up account-level shipping settings first, and only add the shipping attribute per product for genuine exceptions.
What triggers it
"Missing shipping costs" means Google looked for a shipping cost for the product and found none, neither at the account level nor via a feed-level shipping attribute. Shipping is a required piece of information for products to serve: without it, Google has no way to tell a shopper what they'll pay to receive the item.
This is most common for new accounts that haven't configured shipping settings yet, or for a subset of products that were added outside the normal feed and never picked up the account defaults.
How /tools helps
Shipping settings live in your Merchant Center account and store, not in enrichment, but the feed is checked for products missing a shipping signal where one is expected, so a gap gets flagged before it turns into a batch of disapprovals.
Step by step
- Check your account-level shipping settings. Most merchants should have a standard rate set once in Merchant Center (flat rate, free over a threshold, or carrier-calculated). If nothing is configured there, that's the gap.
- Set up account-level shipping if it's missing. This covers your whole catalogue in one place and is the simplest fix for most stores.
- Add the shipping attribute only for exceptions. If specific products need different rates (oversized items, free shipping on a subset), add the shipping attribute for those products rather than trying to cover the whole catalogue in the feed.
- Confirm the flag clears after the next crawl. Once a shipping cost is defined somewhere for the product, Merchant Center should clear the error within the normal crawl window.