If you're a retailer that dispatches products domestically to the US, France or Germany, you can choose to let Google calculate a delivery speed (sometimes called 'delivery time') for your customers.
If you’re looking for information about shipping speeds in Merchant Center Next, click here.
On this page
- Benefits
- Using delivery locations and information from your delivery carrier
- How to set carrier-calculated transit times for a new delivery service
Benefits
Delivery speed is a critical factor in customers' purchase decisions. By allowing Google to calculate delivery speeds, you'll receive the following benefits:
- Improved accuracy: When retailers configure their delivery speeds by inputting a handling time range and a transit time range, they often end up with a nationwide delivery speed estimate that is often overly conservative because the estimate must take even the most remote delivery locations into account, for example, delivering from California to Maine. In contrast, when Google calculates delivery speeds for retailers, it does so based on the customer's location. Furthermore, Google may be able to provide delivery speeds that are specific to the item that a user is considering.
- Easy setup: After you have activated Google-calculated delivery speeds, Google handles all the calculations required to display these more detailed and comprehensive delivery speeds on eligible ads, free product listings and organic results.
- Rank boost: Quoted delivery speed is also used in some of Google's ranking models. If you provide these fast delivery speeds to Google, your offers may be shown more prominently than those offers with slower speeds or without a delivery speed.
Three ways to have Google calculate your delivery speeds:
- Calculate delivery speeds based on your carrier and dispatch-from locations: This option allows Google to estimate your delivery speeds by using the locations that you commonly dispatch from, your customer's location and the point-to-point transit time estimates from your delivery carriers.
- Calculate delivery speeds based on partner data: This option allows Google to calculate your delivery speeds using your order tracking history provided by your linked partner. When you use this option, you also verify your performance, which makes it easier to obtain certain annotations, such as 'free and fast delivery' and those from the 'Shopping Experience Scorecard'. When you provide Google with your order tracking history, you also verify your performance, which makes it easier to obtain certain annotations, such as 'free and fast delivery' and those from the 'Shopping Experience Scorecard'. Specifically with respect to 'free and fast', if you offer free delivery or free delivery over a minimum order value, Google may apply the 'free and fast' annotation when your products display to users in locations where Google's model assesses that you typically deliver in three days or less. Learn more about providing historical order tracking data to display more accurate delivery speeds.
- Calculate delivery speeds from an uploaded file: This option allows Google to calculate your delivery speeds based on the order tracking history that you provide yourself through an upload. The benefits of this option are the same as those of calculating your delivery speeds based on partner data, except for the ease of setup. You must transform your data into a Google-readable format and pass the data to Google every two weeks instead of the partner doing it automatically.
Using delivery locations and information from your delivery carrier
How it works
Google uses your warehouse dispatch-from locations, your customer's delivery location and your carrier's delivery information (e.g. the time-in-transit tables related to the specific carrier services(s) that you select) to calculate a unique delivery speed that appears in your listings. You still provide the handling time, while Google will calculate the transit time and overall delivery speed for each unique combination of locations provided by your carriers, for example, postcodes.
What if you have multiple carriers or dispatch-from locations
In general, if you have multiple delivery services of any type for the same offer, we'll show your customers the delivery speed associated with the cheapest delivery 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 and carrier services, we'll display the fastest speed to the customer's location. That means that this feature has two important behaviours to be aware of:
First, it assumes the same ('mirrored') inventory in all of the 'dispatch-from' locations that you include in a given Google-calculated service. So, we'll always choose the closest dispatch-from location when calculating a delivery speed. If you have different products in your dispatch-from locations, you can create a delivery service that only works for specific products or regions.
Second, it chooses the fastest carrier service when calculating a delivery speed, regardless of cost to you. For example, if you were to select 'FedEx Standard Overnight' and 'FedEx Ground' as your carrier services in a Google-calculated service, we would likely display speeds based primarily on 'FedEx Overnight' as it is the faster service.
Eligibility
To participate, you need to:
- Deliver to customers in one of these eligible countries: Germany, France or the United States
- Have dispatch-from locations in the same eligible country. Cross-border fulfilment is not currently supported
- Use one of the available carriers
How to set carrier-calculated transit times for a new delivery service
- Click Add delivery service under 'Your delivery services' on the main delivery page.
- Enter a name for your delivery service, for example, 'Standard ground delivery'.
- Select all of the eligible countries under 'Which countries can you deliver to with this service?'.
- Select the currency used in the country and make sure that it matches the currency listed in your feed. If the currency is different, your items may be disapproved.
- Click Next to configure the delivery time settings.
- Select Your carrier and dispatch-from location under 'How do you want to determine delivery times for this service?'.
- Enter your dispatch-from location(s). If it does not yet exist, use Add dispatch-from location to provide the name, address, handling time and order cut off information.
- You can create multiple delivery services using the same dispatch-from location.
- You can update the location and handling time details for your dispatch-from location at any time by clicking Your delivery locations on the main delivery setting page. Any changes that you make will automatically be propagated to all delivery services that refer to that dispatch-from location.
- Select Add carrier to choose the possible combinations of carrier and service level that you'd like to apply to this delivery service and click Save.
- Click Next to configure the delivery rates that you charge your customers.
- Every delivery service can only have one delivery cost framework, for example, free delivery or a flat fee, that you charge your customers. If your delivery service contains multiple dispatch-from locations or carrier services, all of the possible dispatch-from locations and carrier service combinations must share the same delivery cost framework. You'll need to create a separate delivery service for every individual delivery cost framework that you charge your customers.
- If you have selected more than one carrier and/or carrier service, you will not be able to price your service based on the delivery rates defined by your carrier.
- Click Save and you're all set with this delivery service.