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Benefits
Shipping speed is a critical factor in customers’ purchase decisions. By allowing Google to calculate shipping speeds, you’ll receive the following benefits:
- Clarity and accuracy: Manually-configured shipping speeds are often overly conservative because they typically take the most remote locations into account. In general, Google-calculated shipping speeds are determined by the customer’s location, often making them more precise.
- Easy entry: After you activate Google-calculated shipping speeds, your estimated delivery times are automatically calculated and displayed on eligible ads and free product listings.
How Google calculates
How it works
The total shipping speed that each customer sees is based on handling time plus transit time, and is unique to that customer’s delivery location and the products they’re purchasing. You still provide the handling time, while Google will calculate the transit time and overall shipping speed.
Google uses your warehouse locations, your customer’s delivery location, and your carrier’s shipping information (for example, the time-in-transit tables related to the specific carrier service you select) to calculate a unique shipping speed that appears in your listings.
What if you have multiple warehouses or ship-from locations
If you’re a retailer that ships products domestically to the US, France, or Germany, you have the option to distribute your inventory among multiple warehouses or ship-from locations for faster shipping. You can add multiple ship-from locations if you are shipping within the same country (for example, US to US or FR to FR).
In general, if you have multiple shipping policies of any type for the same offer, we'll show your customers the shipping speed associated with the cheapest shipping service that reaches their location. If multiple services have the same, lowest cost, Google will choose the service with the fastest speed among those services.
If the cheapest delivery service is a Google-calculated service where you've provided multiple warehouses or ship-from locations, we'll display the fastest speed to the customer's location. We assume the same ('mirrored') inventory in all of the ship-from locations that you include in a given Google-calculated service. So, we'll always choose the closest dispatch-from location when calculating a shipping speed. If you have different products in your ship-from locations, you can create a shipping service that only works for specific products or regions.
Eligibility
To participate, you need to:
- Ship to US, DE, and FR customers
- Have ship-from location based in the US, DE, and FR
- Only domestic shipping is eligible for this feature (for example, ship-from location based in DE ships to consumers in DE only)
- Use one of our select carriers
- For US: UPS, USPS, and FedEx
- For DE: DHL, DPD, GLS, and Hermes
- For FR: Colissimo, DHL, Geodis, and TNT
Set carrier calculated transit times
In your Merchant Center account, click Shipping and returns under “YOUR BUSINESS”.
Under the “Shipping policies” tab, click +Add shipping information.
Under “Countries,” select United States without adding other countries. If you ship to multiple countries, you can create a separate shipping information for the rest of the countries.
Click Continue.
Under “Products,” select the products that share shipping costs and delivery options and click Continue.
Under “Delivery times”, select “by carrier” option and click Continue.
Select Add Ship-from location and enter your ship-from location details including address, handling time, and order cut off information. Then click Add.
- You can add multiple ship-from locations within this step.
Select your carrier and carrier service level.
Click Continue to configure the shipping cost you charge your customers.
Click Save.