One merchant account blocked releases for all 21 of my apps: Korean individual developers and Play Console's "additional information required"

Published 2026-09-16Measured 2026-09-15About 3 min readelta · EltaCrew

Right after I set up a merchant account to test a donation in-app product, Play Console demanded a business registration number and an e-commerce license number and blocked every release on the account. Deleting the products did not help, deleting the payout account did not help, and support's final answer was "this cannot be reversed". How an individual developer avoids this trap.

On the afternoon of 14 September 2026 I committed an edit through the API to update one app and got a 403.

To comply with Korean law, developers in Korea must provide additional information on the Account Details page.

The publishing overview showed "1 issue found: update account details", and all 21 apps were in the same state. The account had been releasing normally hours earlier.

What triggered it

I had done exactly one thing that morning. To try a "support the developer" button, I created a seller profile on the payments account and registered three test in-app products. From that moment Play treated the account as one that monetizes.

The required fields sit under Developer account › Account details › "Additional information required for developers in Korea":

Business registration number
E-commerce license number (mail-order sales registration)
E-commerce license agency (the authority that issued it)

I am an individual with no business registration. The help center said individuals only need a phone number and the three fields are for companies distributing paid or in-app apps. The documentation and the system disagreed.

What I tried to undo it (all failed)

Deleted the three in-app products. Still blocked. The trigger was the merchant account itself, not the products.
Deleted the payout bank account. No effect.
Closing the payments profile. I did not try this. It was the same profile created at developer registration, so closing it would also remove AdMob and AdSense payments and could affect the developer account itself.
Searching the web. No workaround. A community thread with the same situation was locked without an answer, and every Korean guide said "register as a sole proprietor, then file the mail-order registration".

What support said

I filed several tickets; most were misrouted to other teams and came back as boilerplate. A human answer arrived on the second day:

If a merchant account exists, the account counts as monetizing even with only free apps and zero products.
The three fields are mandatory regardless of account type (individual or organization).
A registered merchant account cannot be reversed.
The only alternative is a new developer account under a different email (without creating a seller profile this time), transferring the apps, then deleting the old account.

The next day I asked five follow-up questions about keeping the old account through manual review. After internal re-checking, the answer to all five was no.

Options and decision

Two paths remained:

Register a sole proprietorship, file the mail-order registration, fill in the three fields
Create a new account and transfer 21 apps

I chose the latter. A donation button was not a reason to register a business, and ad revenue comes through AdMob, which is separate from the Play merchant account. The new account cleared identity, device and phone verification within a day. App transfer keeps reviews, ratings, install counts and users, and the documentation says existing users keep using the apps during the transfer.

Things I had to check before transferring:

Everything tied to the old account: API service account, report storage bucket, console app IDs, a Google Ads link. AdMob IDs in the app code, in-app update code and OAuth signing are independent of the account and do not break.
AdMob is separate from Play. Payment account, PIN and bank stay; if needed you just re-link the apps on the AdMob side.
I downloaded the old account's reports (thousands of statistics CSVs) and a snapshot of every store listing beforehand. Those are the only things that do not transfer.

How an individual developer avoids this

Before enabling a seller profile on the payments account, find the way to reverse it. I could not, because there is none.
In Korea, any of in-app billing, donations or paid apps effectively presupposes a business registration and a mail-order filing. The sentence "individuals only need a phone number" is only true while no merchant account exists.
If your apps earn from ads only, there is no reason to create a merchant account. For donations, an external link on a web page is enough.
Before switching anything on, ask "does this change how the whole account is classified?". Some settings are judged per account, not per app.

Summary

Merchant account registered = whole account counts as monetizing = three mandatory fields for Korean individuals. No undo.
Deleting products or the payout account does not clear it.
The only fix was a new account plus app transfer, and AdMob was unaffected.
The mistake was enabling something without first checking how to reverse it.

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