What To Do When You Can’t See Your Invitation to Google Merchant Center

Here is a quick guide on what to do if you get an invitation to manage a Google Merchant Center account and the email is completely blank. We realise that this is a very niche problem, but if it gets someone out of a bind… you’re welcome!

We’ve been getting invitations that have come through as completely blank (see pic above), which is a bit weird. We thought it was because the laptop we were using had a really old copy of Outlook (ahem… 2013 anyone?) but after upgrading to Outlook 2021, the problem is still there.

So, what to do?

The email you get is written in HTML like any normal web page, and your email client either renders that wonderfully – like a webmail might handle this email for instance – or not-so-much.

It does mean that you can access the HTML though and seek out the link you are looking for.

Right-click the email to get a ‘view source’ option. Click this and you should get a text file pop up on screen that shows you the HTML of the email you can’t view properly.

If you know HTML, we need say no more and you will be able to figure out the rest from here.  If you don’t know HTML though, here’s what you do…

You need to either scroll down to the part of the document that is basically written in the English language and is not just a bunch of code. Or click ctrl-F and you will be able to find copy similar to the following wording:

“You’ve been invited by <email address> to join the Google Merchant Center account for <Brand name>. Click the button to accept your invitation. If this person or business isn’t familiar to you, please ignore this email.”

This means you are roughly in the right part of the document.  A few lines down from the above paragraph you will see an <a> tag with a long web address in it. The web address starts with ‘https://notification.google.com’ and is then followed by lots and lots of characters. Lots and lots!

Copy the contents of the ‘href’ attribute – i.e. the whole of this web address – all the characters between the speech marks basically, and this is your Google Merchant Center invitation.

Paste this into a web browser where you are logged in to the Google account that has been invited to join and hit ‘return’ on your keyboard.

Voila! It will let you in!

Contact us

If you’d like help with Google Ads management or want help setting up feeds for Google Merchant Center or social ad feeds, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.