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

In this article

• Benefits
• Requirements to participate in regional availability and pricing
• Set up regions
• Instructions to set up regions
• Instructions to set up regional inventory
• Set up landing page
• Troubleshooting

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 clicks where your products are available, 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

To participate in regional availability and pricing, you'll need to complete the following onboarding steps:

• Set up regions
• Set up regional inventory
• 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 & pricing works with all feed-powered campaigns (Performance Max campaigns, Shopping campaigns, Video Action campaigns [allowlist, US only]) and feed-powered ads formats (Shopping ads, Free Product listings, Display ads, YouTube affiliate Shopping), as well as merchant center add-ons and attributes such as promotions and sale_price.

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 be turned on for national availability only.

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 an area 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 sets of 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 individual account level, which can be done either through the “Regions” page in Merchant Center or through Content API.The MCA level is not yet supported.

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 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 postal code
  • Can be alphanumeric
  • Can’t have symbols other than "_"
  • Length limit: between 1 and 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/availability, one region and its corresponding price/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.

Example Configurations

For offers that do not have regional overrides, continue to manage national price and availability (in_stock or out_of_stock) in the primary feed as you normally would.

Instructions to set up regions

Instructions to set up regional inventory

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.

Note that the URL should be updated in the primary data source. If it's added to the regional feed, it could result in products not showing up.

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.

1. Recommend that you follow the best practices for landing pages.
2. To prevent crawling issues, check schema.org markup.
3. You can use the Rich Results Tool to test your landing pages.

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

A common cause for incorrect price or availability is the time difference between updates on your website and updates of your product data in Merchant Center. We recommend that you schedule feed uploads or updates via the Content API immediately after the products have been updated on your website. If the price or availability status of your products changes very frequently, we recommend that you upload the feed more often or consider using the Content API which allows you to update individual products.

In order to stay compliant, we recommend following these help center articles:

• For price
• For availability
• For microdata
• For inconsistency between feed and landing page
• Request a review of your issues

To access the list of current issues:

1. In your Merchant Center account, Select Products from the left navigation panel.
2. Navigate to the need attention tab, where you can view the list of current issues.

Try our guided feed setup troubleshooter for help fixing issues with creating, formatting or uploading your feed (for text, tab-delimited or XML file feeds only).

Try our guided price issues troubleshooter for help fixing warnings or disapprovals related to price.

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.

Frequently asked questions