This article provides a comprehensive overview of how various pricing features work together on Shopping ads and free listings. Whether you offer standard prices, sales or special promotions, understanding these aspects will ensure that your product information is accurate and informative for potential customers. Many of these pricing features will show up as annotations on your ads or free listings.
On this page
- Core pricing concepts
- Automatic updates and discounts
- Special pricing programmes
- Subscription and instalment options
Note: Feature availability, requirements and policies may vary by country. See individual feature articles for details.
Core pricing concepts
This section explains the main pricing concepts used on Shopping ads and free listings:
- Price
[price]: This refers to the standard price of your product, excluding any discounts, promotions or loyalty (member) prices. - Sale price
[sale_price]: This is a temporary discounted price offered for a specific period, excluding any loyalty (member) prices. - Sales price annotations: When offering a sale price, sales price annotations will typically display both the original and discounted prices. Learn more about sale price annotations.
- Price drop annotations: Price drop annotations make it easier for consumers to understand when the price of your products decreases significantly. Learn more about price drop annotations.
Automatic updates and discounts
You can automate some of your pricing actions:
- Automatic price updates: You can enable automatic price updates to fix temporary inaccuracies with your prices to ensure that your product prices reflect the prices on your site. Learn how to allow Merchant Centre to update product information automatically. Note: Automatic updates aren't a replacement for regular updates of your product data.
- Automated discounts: An AI-powered solution that helps to effectively maximise (gross) profit performance across your entire inventory, while automating sale prices for your products.
- Currency conversion: Currency conversion helps you expand the reach of your products to more countries. Currency conversion is automatically enabled in all Merchant Centre accounts. Just submit the products and prices that you use on your website, and the tool will estimate the currency conversion and show this in your ads and listings.
Special pricing programmes
Here are some special pricing programmes that you can utilise:
- Regional price: You can set different prices for your products based on the geographical location where they are being offered. Learn more about regional availability and pricing.
- Promotion price: This refers to a specific discount offered at checkout through a promotional code or a promotional campaign. Promotions are structured discounts and can apply to multiple products. Get started with promotions.
- Loyalty price: This allows you to showcase discounted prices to your loyalty programme members or shoppers who are interested in joining the programme. Learn more about the merchant loyalty programme.
Subscription and instalment options
These options allow you to offer flexible payment methods for your products:
- Subscription cost
[subscription_cost]: If you offer subscription-based products, you can specify the recurring subscription fees. - Instalment
[installment]: This allows you to display the instalment pricing breakdown for products that can be purchased on a payment plan.
Note: Depending on your region, you may need to factor in VAT (Value Added Tax) or other applicable taxes when setting your product prices. Learn more about price requirements.