Getting a Spiritual Shop Ready for Google Shopping: What We Changed

When we opened Hedge Magic, one of the first things we wanted was for our candles, crystals and incense to appear in Google Shopping, the product listings that sit at the top of so many searches. We also knew that spiritual and wellbeing shops have a hard time getting there. Shops selling crystals, essential oils, incense and tarot are turned down or suspended by Google Merchant Center far more often than most, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with the products themselves.

So before we listed anything, we went through the site page by page. This is what we changed, in the hope it saves another small shop some of the same work.

1. We removed every health claim

This is the big one for our corner of retail. For centuries, crystals, herbs and oils have been linked in folklore with all sorts of benefits, and it is easy to write a product description that slips from "traditionally associated with calm" into "relieves anxiety". Google treats the second as an unapproved health claim, and one sentence like it on one product page can be enough to have a whole shop suspended.

We rewrote our descriptions around what each piece is, how it has been used in tradition and folklore, and how you might use it in a small ritual at home. Our terms say plainly that meanings are given for interest and are not medical or therapeutic claims. Words like heal, cure, treat and relieve simply do not appear on our product pages.

2. We made our policies easy to find and complete

Google checks that a shopper could find out how delivery, returns and refunds work before they buy. Ours are linked from the footer of every page:

• Delivery: prices for each area, dispatch times and typical delivery times, including what happens with international orders, import VAT and duties.
• Returns: a 30-day returns window, who pays return postage, what cannot be returned for hygiene reasons, and what to do if something arrives damaged.
• Terms and privacy: written in plain English, including how digital products and cancellations work and exactly what personal data we keep.

The prices and terms on these pages match what customers see in the basket and at checkout, word for word. A mismatch between the policy page and the checkout is one of the most common reasons for rejection.

3. We made it obvious who we are

A shop with no visible owner looks risky, to Google and to shoppers. Our About page explains who founded Hedge Magic and why, and our Contact page gives an email address, a telephone number, a postal address and a contact form, with a promise to reply within one working day.

4. We cleaned up the product data

Google Shopping runs on a product feed, and a messy feed is quietly penalised. For every product we made sure of the following:

• A clear title that says what the item is, rather than a list of keywords.
• The correct brand where a product is made by a known maker, and barcodes where they exist.
• The right Google product category, which matters for crystals and oils as they can otherwise be miscategorised.
• A large, clean main photograph, with extra images where we have them.
• Prices and delivery costs in the feed that match the website exactly.
• Stock that is checked every few minutes, so we never advertise something that has sold out.

5. We matched the website to the feed

Every product page carries the same price, availability, delivery and returns information in a form that search engines can read, alongside the visible page. When Google crawls the page and compares it with the feed, everything lines up.

6. We checked before we submitted

The last step was to check the whole site before submitting it, rather than waiting for a rejection email and guessing at the reason. The scanner we use for this is Certanza, which looks for the kinds of problems that lead to Merchant Center and Google Ads suspensions, from missing policy pages to risky wording, and explains how to fix each one. In the spirit of honesty, Certanza is made by the same team behind Hedge Magic: we built it after going through this process ourselves.

If your shop has already been suspended

Do not request a review straight away. Work through the points above first, fix everything you can find, and only then appeal, explaining briefly what you changed. A second rejection usually takes longer to put right than the first.

And if you came here for candles rather than Google, our guide to candle magic is a much more peaceful read.