Restricted purchase
What causes the "Restricted purchase" error in Merchant Center and how to fix it.
This error means customers are blocked from completing a purchase because of a geographic or device restriction that doesn't match what's declared in your feed or account. Fix it by aligning the countries and devices your site actually serves with what's configured in Merchant Center.
What triggers it
"Restricted purchase" means Google has found that some customers, based on their location or device, are blocked from completing a purchase that your feed or account settings say should be available to them. The most common cause is a mismatch between what you've configured in Merchant Center (countries you're targeting) and what your site actually allows: a geo-block on the storefront that excludes a country your feed is advertising to, or a device-specific restriction that doesn't line up with your targeting.
This overlaps with shipping and tax attributes in one common case: a product that ships to a region also needs to be purchasable from that region, so a shipping rule and a site restriction need to agree, not just the feed and Merchant Center settings.
How /tools helps
Feed-level country and shipping-region settings are checked for consistency as part of your feed health checks, so a targeting mismatch between what the feed promises and what the site actually restricts is easier to catch before it disapproves live products.
Step by step
- Check which countries and devices are targeted in Merchant Center. Look at your feed's target countries and any device settings against what your site is actually configured to serve.
- Test the purchase path from a targeted region. If your feed targets a country your site geo-blocks, or requires a login/region that shoppers there don't have, that's the mismatch.
- Align the two. Either remove the country or device from your Merchant Center targeting if you genuinely don't serve it, or fix the site restriction so targeted shoppers can actually complete a purchase.
- Re-test and confirm the flag clears. Once a shopper in every targeted country and on every targeted device can complete a purchase, the error should clear on the next check.