Regional availability and pricing

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.

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

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 valid clicks from Shopping ads, 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, you'll need to complete the following onboarding steps:

• Set up regions.
• Update your landing pages such that correct regional price and/or availability displays when a region_id is 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 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 preorder and backorder aren't supported).

In addition, automatic item updates can't be turned on for regional or national availability. It however can be turned on for automatic price updates at national level.

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 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 shipping, and regional availability and pricing, or you can create multiple regions and use them for either service.

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 account level, which can be done either through the “Regions” page in Merchant Center or through Content API.

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.

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 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 postal code
  • Can be alphanumeric
  • Can’t have symbols
  • Length limit: between 5 and 100 characters

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, 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 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.

Creating a new region

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 5 characters).
• 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.

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:

• 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.

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 trash icon next to the name of the region in the “Region name” column, and then click Confirm.

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. The landing page must be static for each region ID even if the URL is accessed from a different geographic location.

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.

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

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 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.