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 region or you might sell food products that vary in price depending on the region that they are purchased in. This feature allows you to specify the regions in which your products are available and control pricing regionally.
Regional availability and pricing is available for offers with the following target countries:
- Australia, Brazil, France, Russia, United States
Regional availability and pricing is in beta for these countries:
- Argentina, Austria, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom and Vietnam
Benefits
Regional availability and pricing helps you to:
- Promote inventory that's regionally priced, in stock and available for delivery
- Ensure that your online products are shown to the correct audience and that you only pay for valid clicks from Shopping ads, as your products will only be shown to users in the custom regions that you define
- Expand your reach to delivery areas outside the radius of your shops, if you use local inventory ads
Requirements
To participate in regional availability and pricing, you'll need to complete the following onboarding steps:
- Set up regions.
- Update your landing pages so that the correct regional price and/or availability displays when a
region_idis appended to the URL.
Compatibilities
Regional availability and pricing is compatible with standard Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. You won't need to configure any special regional settings in your Shopping campaigns. These will all be configured from your Merchant Center account.
Compatible surfaces: Products advertised through Shopping ads on Google Search, free listings on Search and the Shopping tab, display ads (for allowlisted merchants), YouTube affiliate shopping, product snippets and video action campaigns.
Regional availability and pricing only supports the values in_stock and out_of_stock for the availability [availability] attribute (the values pre-order and backorder aren't supported).
In addition, automatic item updates can't be turned on for regional or national availability. However, it can be turned on for automatic price updates at a national level.
Set up regions
What are regions?
If the country that 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 delivery zones.
A region is used to define areas 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 delivery and regional availability and pricing or you can create multiple regions and use them for either service.
Note: Regional availability and pricing isn't the same as regional delivery and may not be available in the same set of countries. Learn more about delivery settings.
A region is defined by:
- A geographic area defined by a set of postcodes 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 account level, which can be done either through the 'Regions' page in Merchant Center or through the Content API.
Set up regions by defining either postcode or state/province-based areas on the 'Regions' tab on 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 postcode-based regions as well.
| Postcode |
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 |
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 km² and be expanded until the area represents the locations of at least 1,000 people.
- Regions ideally should be geographically contiguous. Avoid adding unattached small area codes to a region. A small area code can be extended by clustering it with other area codes that surround it 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 postcode
- Can be alphanumeric
- Can't have symbols
- Length limit: Between 5 and 100 characters
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/availability, we will pick one region and its corresponding price/availability 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 hub of delivery, we recommend basing your regions around these locations.
- If you set your region ID to be a postcode that exists within the region or a shop ID already used internally by your site, it may make the landing page integration easier.
Creating a new region
Note: Refer to this article for the list of available add-ons that you can activate in your Merchant Center account.
In your Merchant Center account, click the tools and settings icon
.
Select Add-ons.
- If your target country is eligible for regional availability and pricing, you will be able to activate the regions add-on.
To do so, 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.
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 be alphanumeric (minimum of five characters).
- 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.
Create your region using postcodes or states/provinces.
- To use postcodes, enter one entry per line in any of the following styles:
- A postcode (e.g. A01 2BC)
- A range of postcodes (e.g. A01 2BC–A10 3DF)
- A range of postcodes using a prefix with a wildcard (*) (e.g. A01*)
- A range of postcodes using two prefixes with wildcards (*), using the same number of digits for both prefixes (e.g. A01*–A10*)
- Note: There is a limit of 25,000 postcode entries per account (a range of postcodes is considered one entry).
- To use states/provinces, select the correct ones.
Click Add and then click Save to finish creating the region.
Editing 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:
- Postcodes:
- Add new codes just like you did when you created the region, with one range per line. Click Add postcodes.
- To remove a postcode, click the X next to it or click Clear all to remove all postcodes.
- States/provinces
- Select or deselect the tick boxes.
Click Save to finish editing the region.
Removing 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 bin icon
Set up your 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 click-through 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. The landing page must be static for each region ID, even if the URL is accessed from a different geographic location.
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 postcodes or existing internal shop IDs and your landing page already has a location/shop 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.
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. Once you've satisfied the necessary requirements, the error messages will disappear.
Price and availability mismatch
To avoid regional price and availability mismatch warnings and disapprovals, update the feed and site data as simultaneously as possible.
Unsupported destination based on regional settings
This is an item-level warning that indicates that you are targeting some serving destinations that aren't supported for regional offers. Your offers will still continue to serve everywhere that regional offers are supported.