Regional availability and pricing is an add-on feature available in Merchant Center Next. This article explains the benefits of using Regional availability and how it works. It lets you show product availability and variable pricing based on your business presence and the location of your customer base by providing regional overrides for the national availability and/or pricing.
Example
Your business might only have a presence in certain parts of the country or particular cities within a state, or you might sell food products that vary in price depending on the region they are purchased in. This feature allows you to specify the regions where your products are available and control pricing regionally.
Regional availability and pricing is available for offers with target countries:
- Australia, Brazil, France, Russia, United States
Regional availability and pricing is in beta for these countries:
- Argentina, Austria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and Vietnam
In this article
- Benefits
- Requirements to participate in regional availability and pricing
- Set up regions
- Instructions to set up regions
- Instructions to set up regional inventory
- Set up landing page
- Troubleshooting
Benefits
Regional availability and pricing helps you:
- Promote inventory that's regionally priced, in stock, and available to ship.
- Ensure that your online products are shown to the correct audience and you only pay for clicks where your products are available, as your products will only be shown to users in the custom regions you define.
- Expand your reach to delivery areas outside the radius of your stores, if you use local inventory ads.
Requirements to participate in regional availability and pricing
To participate in regional availability and pricing, you'll need to complete the following onboarding steps:
- Set up regions
- Set up regional inventory
- Update your landing pages such that correct regional price and/or availability displays when a
region_idis appended to the URL.
Compatibilities
Regional availability & pricing works with all feed-powered campaigns (Performance Max campaigns, Shopping campaigns, Video Action campaigns [allowlist, US only]) and feed-powered ads formats (Shopping ads, Free Product listings, Display ads, YouTube affiliate Shopping), as well as merchant center add-ons and attributes such as promotions and sale_price.
Regional availability and pricing only supports the values in_stock and out_of_stock for the availability [availability] attribute (the values preorder and backorder aren't supported).
Note: You can set different levels of regional availability for your products. For example, if your product is available in a subset of postal codes within a state, you can mark your product as in_stock in the regional feed for the state and out_of_stock in the national feed.
In addition, automatic item updates can be turned on for national availability only.
Set up regions
What are Regions?
If the country you sell your products in is eligible for regional availability and pricing, you’ll be able to activate the new “Regions” add-on on the Add-on page, allowing you to specify regions for both regional inventory and/or shipping delivery zones.
A region is used to define an area in which products share the same online availability, price, or both. Depending on your business model, you may only need one set of regions for both shipping, and regional availability and pricing, or you can create multiple sets of regions and use them for either service.
Note: Regional availability and pricing isn’t the same as regional shipping and may not be available in the same set of countries. Learn more about shipping settings.
A region is defined by:
- A geographic area defined by a set of postal codes or states/provinces.
- A region ID uniquely identifying each region. It’s used to indicate the region in the regional inventory feed.
Regions are configured at the individual account level, which can be done either through the “Regions” page in Merchant Center or through Content API.The MCA level is not yet supported.
Set up regions by defining either postal code or state/province-based areas on the "Regions" tab in the “Business info” page of your Merchant Center account.
Region granularity support: All RAAP-eligible countries support state/province-based regions, and some countries also support more granular postal code-based regions as well.
| Postal Code |
AU, BR, CA, DE, FR, GB*, HU, IN, JP, NL, NZ, US |
| State/Province |
AR, AT, CL, CO, CZ, DK, ES, HU, ID, IT, MX, MY, NO, PE, PH, PK, RO, RU, SE, TH, VN, ZA |
Note: In Great Britain, only the "outward code" of postal codes are supported. Prefixing and wildcards are also not yet supported.
Example: For the postal code "SW1A 1AA", "SW1A" is the supported portion.
Region requirements
- The currency used for a region must be the same as the currency used for the initial product offer.
- Regions need to meet minimum geographic size and population requirements. They must cover an area of 3 sq km, and be expanded until the area represents the locations of at least 1,000 people.
- Regions should ideally be geographically contiguous. Each contiguous area within a region is individually subject to the size and population limits mentioned in the bullet point above. Avoid adding unattached small areas to a region. A small area can be extended by clustering it with surrounding postal codes to make it larger. If the region doesn’t meet these size requirements, an error message will be shown in the “Issue” column on the "Regions" page.
- Region ID requirements:
- Can be postal code
- Can be alphanumeric
- Can’t have symbols other than "_"
- Length limit: between 1 and 100 characters
- Lower case only
Best practices
- Avoid including an area (such as a postal code, state, or oblast) in more than one region. If 2 regions overlap, and they have conflicting regional price/availability, one region and its corresponding price/availability will be selected at serving time.
- You don’t need to set up regions for the entire country; you only need to cover the areas which require a regional override for an offer.
- If you have a physical warehouse or hub of delivery, we recommend basing your regions around these locations.
- If you set your region ID to be a postal code that exists within the region, or to a store ID already used internally by your site, it may make the landing page integration easier.
Example Configurations
For offers that do not have regional overrides, continue to manage national price and availability (in_stock or out_of_stock) in the primary feed as you normally would.
Offers are available nationally with the exception of a handful of states or areas
out_of_stock for those regions.| National Product Feed | Regional Inventory Feed | ||
| Availability | Price | Availability | Price |
in_stock |
National Price | out_of_stock |
Blank |
Offers are only available in a handful of states or areas, not nationally
in_stock for those regions.| National Product Feed | Regional Inventory Feed | ||
| Availability | Price | Availability | Price |
out_of_stock |
National Price | in_stock |
Blank |
Offers have regional pricing for some or all states or areas
| National Product Feed | Regional Inventory Feed | ||
| Availability | Price | Availability | Price |
out_of_stock |
National Price* | Blank | Regional Price |
*Use realistic pricing. Don’t use values of $0 USD or $1 USD.
Offers are only available in a handful of states or areas, not nationally, and have regional pricing
| National Product Feed | Regional Inventory Feed | ||
| Availability | Price | Availability | Price |
in_stock |
National Pricing* | in_stock |
Regional Price |
*Use realistic pricing ex. the pricing most common across states or areas.
| National Product Feed | Regional Inventory Feed | |||||
| id | Availability | Price | id | Availability | Price | region_id |
| item_A | out_of_stock |
National Pricing* | item_A | in_stock |
Regional Price | region123 |
| item_B | out_of_stock |
National Pricing* | item_A | out_of_stock |
Regional Price | region456 |
Instructions to set up regions
Activate the "Regions" add-on
In your Merchant Center account, click the Settings and tools icon
.
Select Add-ons.
Note: If your target country is eligible for regional availability and pricing, you'll be able to activate the "Regions" add-on.
Click Add on the "Regions" add-on card.
After activation, you can navigate to the "Regions" page by selecting "Business info" from the left navigation menu and clicking the "Regions" tab.
Alternatively, after adding the add-on, go to the “Your add-ons” tab and locate the Region card then click on Go to Regions to access the Region tab directly.Create a region
In your Merchant Center account, select Business info
from the left navigation menu.
Select the Regions tab.
Click Add region to create a new region.
Enter values for “Region ID”, “Region name”, and “Country”.
- Region ID needs to be unique for each region and can consist of alphanumeric characters with a length between 1-100. Underscores ("_") are allowed. Only lowercase letters are allowed.
- Region name helps you identify the geographical area you want to include in your region.
- Use the drop-down menu beside “Country” to select which country this region will apply to.
Create your region using postal codes or states/provinces.
- To use postal codes, enter one entry per line in any of the following styles:
- A postal code (for example, 75008)
- A range of postal codes (for example, 2000-2500)
- A range of postal codes using a prefix with a wildcard ( * ) (for example, 94*)
- A range of postal codes using 2 prefixes with wildcards ( * ), using the same number of digits for both prefixes. (for example, 94*-95*)
- Note: There is a limit of 25k postal code entries per account (a range of postal codes is considered one entry).
- To use states/provinces, select the correct ones.
Click Add and then click Save to finish creating the region.
Edit a region
In your Merchant Center account, select Business Info
from the left navigation menu.
Select the Regions tab.
To edit the region name or region ID, edit the text in the relevant field.
- Note: You will need to separately update the region ID in your regional inventory feed.
To edit the geographic area:
- Postal Codes:
- Add new codes just like you did when you created the region, with one range per line. Click Add postal codes.
- To remove a postal code, click the X next to it or click Clear all to remove all postal codes.
- States/Provinces:
- Select or deselect the check boxes.
Click Save to finish editing the region.
Remove a region
Before you can remove a region, make sure that it's no longer in use.
In your Merchant Center account, select Business Info
from the left navigation menu.
Select the Regions tab.
Click the trash icon
Instructions to set up regional inventory
Set up your regional inventory
Set up your regional feed either via the MC feed or Content API and update at a minimum of every 14 days.
To set it up via the MC feed, follow the steps below:
In to your Merchant Center account, select Settings & tools icon
in the top right.
Click Data sources.
Click on the Supplemental sources tab.
Select Add regional inventory.
Upload your regional inventory data source from a file. You can choose one of the following methods to upload a file:
- Enter a link to your file.
- We recommend the scheduled fetch input method. With scheduled fetch, you host your XML data source at a URL and specify when Google should fetch it. Your file location must begin with "http://", "https://" or "sftp://".
- Add a file using SFTP or Google Cloud Storage.
- Click View SFTP and Google Cloud Storage details to create a password and activate your SFTP account or add your Cloud Storage account if you haven’t already done so.
- Upload a file from your computer.
Configure your data source options for the method you've chosen. If you’re using scheduled fetch:
- Enter the file URL.
- Click the pencil icon
across the “Edit schedule” field and select the fetch frequency and time from the drop-down menu. Then click Save.
- If your URL is password-protected, provide your login info.
Click Continue.
Regional inventory data sources support the following required attributes:
- ID
[id](offer id) - Region ID
[region_id](matches the retailer-defined value submitted in the Regions menu)
Regional inventory data sources also support the following optional attributes:
- Price
[price] - Sale price
[sale_price] - Sale price effective date
[sale_price_effective_date] - Availability
[availability](note: onlyin_stockandout_of_stockvalues are supported)
Set up landing page
The price and availability on your landing page must match the regional price/availability shown on Google surfaces from your regional feed. To ensure an accurate landing page experience, Google appends the region ID corresponding to the location of the shopper as a parameter to the clickthrough URL. You must adjust your landing pages so that they can accept this parameter and render a product landing page that shows the corresponding price and availability.
Note that the URL should be updated in the primary data source. If it's added to the regional feed, it could result in products not showing up.
Example
Value provided in the link attribute: https://mystorewebsite.com/p/myproductlandingpage
Final URL: https://mystorewebsite.com/p/myproductlandingpage?region_id=123456
Value provided in the link attribute: https://mystorewebsite.com/p?offer=myproduct
Final URL: https://mystorewebsite.com/p?offer=myproduct®ion_id=123456
Best practices
If your region IDs are postal codes or existing internal store IDs and your landing page already has a location/store picker, you may be able to simplify your landing page integration by passing the region ID directly into the existing picker logic to update the price and availability.
- Recommend that you follow the best practices for landing pages.
- To prevent crawling issues, check schema.org markup.
- You can use the Rich Results Tool to test your landing pages.
Troubleshooting
Review regions and fix issues
In order to use the regions feature, each of your regions must meet the minimum requirements. If you don’t meet these requirements, you’ll notice an error message, with details in the “Issue” column on the “Regions” page. You can filter your regions by issue, or manually address them one by one. When you satisfy the necessary requirements, the error messages will disappear.
Price and availability mismatch
A common cause for incorrect price or availability is the time difference between updates on your website and updates of your product data in Merchant Center. We recommend that you schedule feed uploads or updates via the Content API immediately after the products have been updated on your website. If the price or availability status of your products changes very frequently, we recommend that you upload the feed more often or consider using the Content API which allows you to update individual products.
In order to stay compliant, we recommend following these help center articles:
- For price
- For availability
- For microdata
- For inconsistency between feed and landing page
- Request a review of your issues
To access the list of current issues:
- In your Merchant Center account, Select Products from the left navigation panel.
- Navigate to the need attention tab, where you can view the list of current issues.
Try our guided feed setup troubleshooter for help fixing issues with creating, formatting or uploading your feed (for text, tab-delimited or XML file feeds only).
Try our guided price issues troubleshooter for help fixing warnings or disapprovals related to price.
Unsupported destination based on regional settings
This is an item-level warning that indicates you are targeting some serving destinations that aren’t supported for regional offers. Your offers will still continue to serve everywhere regional offers are supported.
Frequently asked questions
What happens when multiple regions targeting the same location (for example, two identical AA1 regions) are created in the merchant center account?
There won't be any error or warning, but during serving, one will simply be selected. We cannot guarantee which one will be chosen.
Should the region ID be honored for mobile customer journey?
Yes, you should honor the Region ID.
I'm encountering the error “Too many regional overrides.” What should I do?
Please use the contact us form and include a screenshot of the error in your email to the support team.
I’m encountering the error “Over capacity”. What should I do?
Please use the contact us form and include a screenshot of the error in your email to the support team.
When an item is disapproved due to "Mismatched regional pricing", is the product disapproved only in regions where the mismatch was found, or is it fully disapproved and not served at all?
The item won't serve in any region.