Set up regional availability and pricing

1. Go to Add-ons under “Settings” in the left navigation menu.
2. Select the Regions add-on card under the “Discover” tab.
3. Select Activate.

A region is used to define a geographic area in which products share the same non-national online price, availability or both. Regions are used by both the regional availability and price feature as well as regional shipping.

If using both features, depending on your business model, you may only need one set of regions for both or can create separate regions for each.

A region is defined by:

• A geographic area defined by a set of postal codes, states, or provinces.
• A region ID uniquely identifying each region. It’s used to indicate the region in the regional inventory data source.

If you are configuring the Regions via the “Regions” page, define either postal code, state or province-based areas on the "Regions" tab in the “Business info” page of your Merchant Center account.

Regions may be configured within a single account utilizing both postal codes and state/province borders. While it is necessary to select one type of granularity for each distinct region, the account is capable of accommodating both concurrently.

Region granularity support: All RAAP-eligible countries support state or province-based regions, and some countries also support more granular postal code-based regions as well.

• The currency used for a region must be the same as the currency used for the national product offer.
• Regions need to meet minimum geographic size and population requirements. They must cover an area of 3 sq km, and represent represent 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 a postal code
• Can be alphanumeric
• Can’t have symbols other than "_"
• Length limit: between 2 - 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 or availability, one region and its corresponding price or 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.

Regions are configured at the individual account level, which can be done either through the “Regions” page in Merchant Center, Content API or Merchant API. To create a region in the Merchant Center, follow these steps:

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select Business info and then select Regions.
3. Select Add region to create a new region.
4. 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 2 digits - 100. Underscores ("_") and 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.

6. Create your region using postal codes, states, or 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 that there is a default 50K limit on the number of entries per merchant center ID. An entry is either an individual postal code (94043), a wildcard (940*), a range (94000-95000), an AA1 (for example, "California"), or a radius area. If you require limit increase, contact our support team via form.
  • To use states or provinces, select the correct ones.

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select Business info and then select Regions.
3. Select the particular region you want to edit under “Region name” and in “Edit region” make changes in the relevant field.
   • Note that you will need to separately update the region ID in your regional inventory data source to reflect updated regions IDs if you've changed that field here.
4. To edit the geographic area:

• Postal Codes:
  • Add new codes just like you did when you created the region, with one range per line. Select Add postal code.
  • To remove a postal code, select the X next to it or select Clear all to remove all postal codes.

• States or Provinces:
  • Select or deselect the check boxes.

Before you can remove a region, make sure that it's no longer in use.

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings in the left navigation menu.
2. Select Business info and then select Regions.

Since you can set different levels of regional availability for your products, it is important to determine beforehand what type of regional inventory settings and granularity you would require. For example:

• Is your product available in a subset of postal codes within a state? If yes, check below if your target country is supported on the region or postal code level
• Do all your products have regional pricing or availability, or both, or only a subset?

Use the table below as a guidance on possible ways to set up your regional data source:

For offers that don't have regional overrides, continue to manage national price and availability (in_stock or out_of_stock) in the primary data source as you normally would.

*Use realistic pricing. Don’t use values of $0 USD or $1 USD.

*Use realistic pricing. The pricing that is most common across states or areas.