Implement with Google's Orders API

This article provides an overview of the Google Orders API and how it works.

With Shopping Actions, you can showcase your products across different Google platforms. This will give customers an easy way to shop your products with a universal shopping cart, whether they’re on desktop, mobile, or a Google Home device.

Before you can use the Orders API, you need to implement OAuth login.

Note: If you don’t have the technical resources for API or feed integration, you can manually manage your orders using the orders page in Merchant Center, or you can use order feeds to more efficiently make bulk changes. You will need to be listed as an order manager in order to do so. Users with standard user-level permission will have a read-only access to the orders page in Merchant Center. Learn more about setting up user access

How it works

Google's Orders API helps you automatically ingest orders, mark orders as shipped, charge customers, and process returns and refunds.

Order ingestion

Order ingestion is the process of getting information about a customer’s order into your Orders API.

For about 30 minutes after an order is placed, the order is in the inProgress state. In this state, the customer can cancel the entire order or individual line items from the Google order confirmation page. 

You can reserve inventory for an inProgress order, but do not ship any line items or mark items as shipped until the order status changes to pendingShipment.

The steps for order ingestion are below:

1. Retrieve order information to ingest into your Orders API via the list method.
   Note: Orders may not populate the customer’s house number or street address for billing information to your Orders API and  the paymentMethod, billingAddress, and streetAddress fields may appear blank. You may need to modify your Orders API to handle this use case.
2. Once orders have been ingested into your Orders API, acknowledge them via the acknowledge method.

Shipping and billing

To manage item shipment and customer charging information, use the methods below:

• Manage line item cancellation via the cancellineitem method
• Manage order cancellation via the cancel method
• Mark line items as shipped via the shiplineitems method
  • You can assign a carrier tracking ID to a line item when the line item is shipped using shiplineitems or any time after shipment using updateshipment
    Important: Customers are only charged after you’ve marked all items in an order as shipped or cancelled them.
• Mark shipments as delivered via the updateshipment method (optional)

Returns and refunds

Use the method below to perform returns and refunds through the Orders API:

• Declare items as returned, and refund customers via the returnrefundlineitem method. Courtesy refunds can be given using the “refund” method without returning any items. The value of all refunds can’t exceed the total order value.

Note: Make sure to process returns and refunds quickly and professionally. Returns and refunds are tracked as part of Google’s Trust Metric analysis. This analysis is designed to ensure retailers meet our quality standards in order to remain in the Shopping Actions program.

Marketing opt-in information (optional)

If you use Google’s Content API to gather marketing opt-in information, use customer.marketingRightsInfo. That will contain:

• explicitMarketingPreference -- If this is "granted", then merchants can subscribe the user to marketing emails (if not already done so). Otherwise, they should unsubscribe the user.
• marketingEmailAddress -- When "granted", this is the customer email address that merchants should send marketing emails to.
• lastUpdatedTimestamp -- The time at which the customer changed their marketing opt-in preference.