Set up regional availability and pricing

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 delivery.

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

A region is defined by:

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

• 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 km² and 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 postcodes 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 postcode
• Can be alphanumeric
• Can't have symbols other than '_'
• Length of between 2 and 100 characters
• Lower-case only

Best practices

• Avoid including an area (such as a postcode, state or oblast) in more than one region. If two 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 that require a regional override for an offer.
• If you have a physical warehouse or delivery hub, we recommend basing your regions around these locations.
• If you set your region ID to be a postcode that exists within the region, or to a shop ID that's 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 Merchant Center, follow these steps:

1. In your Merchant Center account, select Settings  in the left navigation menu.
2. Select Business info and then Regions.
3. Select Add region to create a new region.
4. Enter values for 'region ID', 'region name' and 'country'.

• The Region ID needs to be unique for each region and can consist of between 2 and 100 alphanumeric characters. Underscores ('_') and only lower-case letters are allowed.
• The region name helps you to identify the geographical area that 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 postcodes, states or provinces.

• To use postcodes, enter one entry per line in any of the following styles:
  • A postcode (e.g. 75008).
  • A range of postcodes (e.g. 2000–2500).
  • A range of postcodes using a prefix with a wildcard (*) (e.g. 94*).
  • A range of postcodes using two prefixes with wildcards (*), using the same number of digits for both prefixes (e.g. 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 postcode (94043), a wildcard (940*), a range (94000–95000), an AA1 (e.g. 'California') or a radius area. If you require a limit increase, contact our support team via this 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 Regions.
3. Select the particular region that 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 region IDs if you've changed that field here.
4. To edit the geographic area:

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

• States or provinces:
  • Select or deselect the tick 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 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 will require. For example:

• Is your product available in a subset of postcodes within a state? If yes, check below if your target country is supported on the region or postcode 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. The pricing that is most common across states or areas.