Regional availability and pricing

If you’re looking for information about regional availability and pricing in Merchant Center Next, click here.

Regional availability and pricing 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.

Example

Your business might only have a presence in certain parts of the country or particular cities within a state, or you might sell food products that vary in price depending on the region they are purchased in. This feature allows you to specify the regions where your products are available and control pricing regionally.

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

To join the regional pricing and availability beta for one of these countries, get in touch with your Google sales representative.

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.

Note: If a LIA radius and RAAP region overlap, LIA will typically take precedence over RAAP for ads.

Requirements

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

• Set up regions.
• Set up regional price and/or availability by providing the price and/or availability of your regional offers in the relevant regions.
• Update your landing pages such that correct regional price and/or availability displays when a region_id is appended to the URL.

Note: For privacy reasons, you may not use the region ID to re-identify any user. You're also responsible for complying with all applicable local laws and regulations related to regional pricing.

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, Video Action Campaigns (for allowlisted merchants in US, reach out to your Google Sales representative to enroll).

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 your target country is eligible for regional availability and pricing (or if your account is allowlisted for a beta country) you’ll notice a new "Regions" menu in your Merchant Center account that allows you to specify regions for both regional inventory and/or shipping delivery zones. Learn more about 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.

Note: Regional availability and pricing isn’t the same as regional shipping and may not be available in the same set of countries. Learn more about shipping settings.

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" 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.

Postal Code	AU, BR, CA, DE, FR, GB, HU, IN, JP, NL, NZ, US
State/Province	AR, AT, CL, CO, CZ, DK, ES, HU, ID, IT, MX, MY, NO, PE, PH, PK, RO, RU, SE, TH, VN, ZA

Note: For Brazil, Great Britain, India, and Japan, while postal code region setup is allowed, when we are unable to determine the consumer’s postal code, we fall back to the city level, by selecting the most populous postal code in the city. Ensure that the region contains the most populous postal code in order to match with it.

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.

Note: Your region eligibility may change over time as it's subject to population changes. You can monitor your eligibility in the "Regions" menu.

• 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

1. Click the tools and settings icon .
2. Select Regions under “Tools”.
3. Click the plus button to create a new region.
4. Enter values for “Region ID”, “Region name”, and “Country”.
   • This region ID needs to be unique for each region and can be alphanumeric (minimum of 5 characters).
   • The 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.
5. Create your region using postal codes or states/provinces.
   1. To use postal codes, enter one entry per line in any of the following styles:
      1. A postal code (for example, 75008)
      2. A range of postal codes (for example, 2000-2500)
      3. A range of postal codes using a prefix with a wildcard ( * ) (for example, 94*)
      4. 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).

   2. To use states/provinces, select the correct ones.
6. Click Add and click Save to finish creating the region.

Editing a region

1. Click the tools and settings icon .
2. Select Regions under “Tools”.
3. 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.

4. To edit the geographic area:
   1. Postal Codes:
      1. Add new codes just like you did when you created the region, with one range per line. Click Add postal codes.
      2. To remove a postal code, click the X next to it or click Clear all to remove all postal codes.
   2. States/Provinces
      1. Select or deselect the check boxes.
5. 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.

1. Click the tools and settings icon .
2. Select Regions under “Tools”.
3. Click the trash icon next to the name of the region in the “Region name” column, and then click Confirm.

Set up regional price and/or availability

The next step is to set up regional price and/or availability. To do this, you need to provide a set of data with offer ID, region ID, and price and/or availability for each combination of offer and region which has a price/availability that differs from the offer’s national price/availability.

Note: This means that you don’t need to set up regional data for all of your offers. Regional data is only required for offers which have regional price or availability.

Regional overrides are configured via a supplemental inventory feed in Merchant Center or via the Content API.

Attributes

This is an overview of regional inventory feed attributes. If using Content API, view the API reference for attributes and methods.

ID [id] Your product’s unique identifier Required Example A2B4 Syntax Max 50 characters Schema.org property: Yes (Learn more)	Use a unique value for each product. Use the product's SKU where possible. Keep the ID the same when updating your data. Use only valid unicode characters. Use the same ID for the same product across countries or languages.
regionId Your product’s regional overrides Required	The ID uniquely identifying each region Can be postal code Can be alphanumeric Cannot contain symbols Length limit: between 5 and 100 characters.
Availability [availability] Your product's regional availability Optional Example in_stock Supported values In stock [in_stock] Out of stock [out_of_stock] Schema.org property: Yes (Learn more)	At least one of availability and/or price are required Accurately submit the product's regional availability and match the regional availability from your landing page and checkout pages.
Price [price] Your products’s regional price Optional Example 15.00 USD Syntax Numeric ISO 4217 Schema.org property: Yes (Learn more)	At least one of availability and/or price are required fields. Accurately submit the product's regional price and currency, and match with the regional price from your landing page and at checkout. Make sure that your landing page and the checkout pages include the regional price in the currency of the target country in a place that's straightforward to find. Ensure that the product can be purchased online for the submitted regional price. Make sure that any customer in the target region can buy the product for the submitted regional price, and without paying for a membership. Don't submit a price of 0 (a price of 0 is allowed for mobile devices sold with a contract). For products sold in bulk quantities, bundles, or multipacks. Submit the total price of the minimum purchasable quantity, bundle, or multipack. For the US and Canada: Don't include tax in the price. For all other countries: Include value added tax (VAT) or Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the price.
Sale price [sale_price] Your product's sale price Optional Example 15.00 USD Syntax Numeric ISO 4217 Schema.org property: No	Meet the requirements for the price [price] attribute. Submit this attribute (sale price) in addition to the price [price] attribute set to the non-sale price. Accurately submit the product's sale price, and match the sale price with your landing page and the checkout pages.
Sale price effective date [sale_price_effective_date] The date range during which the sale price applies Optional Example (For UTC+1) 2016-02-24T11:07+0100 / 2016-02-29T23:07+0100 Syntax Max 51 alphanumeric characters ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm [+hhmm] YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmZ Separate start date and end date with / Schema.org property: No	Use together with the sale price [sale_price] attribute. If you don't submit this attribute (sale price effective date), the sale price always applies. Use a start date before the end date.

Note:

• While the standard limit for regional configurations per offer is 150, this can be increased upon request and approval by your Google sales representative.
• The existing primary feed must also be kept up to date.
• Regional inventory is valid for 14 days. The regional data must be updated at least every 14 days, or the data will expire and Merchant Center will revert to the primary feed settings.

Best practices

• In order to simplify the regional data, we recommend setting that primary feed (national) offer data to reflect the most common status for offers and providing regional data to cover the less common status.
• Reminder that regional overrides are only needed for offers that have regional variance. There is no need to provide both price and availability values in the regional inventory feed when only one is regional. For example, if your prices are consistent across the country and only availability changes, you can leave the [price] field blank in your regional data.

Example configurations

For offers that don’t have regional overrides, continue to manage national price and availability (in_stock/out_of_stock) in the primary feed as you normally would. National URLs and regional URLs will still be crawled for price and availability data quality validation.

Offers are available nationally with the exception of a handful of states or areas.

Define region(s) only for those states or areas and use the regional inventory feed to set the availability of those offers as out_of_stock for those regions.

National Product Feed		Regional Inventory Feed
Availability	Price	Availability	Price
In_Stock	National Price	Out_of_Stock	Blank

Offers are only available in a handful of states or areas, not nationally.

Define region(s) only for those states or areas and use the regional inventory feed to set the availability of those offers as in_stock for those regions.

National Product Feed		Regional Inventory Feed
Availability	Price	Availability	Price
Out_of_Stock	National Price	In_Stock	Blank

Offers have regional pricing for some or all states or areas.

Define region(s) only for those states or areas with regional price differences, and then use the regional inventory feed to set the regional price for those regions.

National Product Feed		Regional Inventory Feed
Availability	Price	Availability	Price
In_Stock	National Price*	Blank	Regional Price

*Use realistic pricing. Don’t use values of $0 USD or $1 USD.

Offers are only available in a handful of states or areas, not nationally, and have regional pricing.

Define region(s) only for those states or areas and then use the regional inventory feed to mark those offers as in_stock for those regions and provide regional prices.

National Product Feed		Regional Inventory Feed
Availability	Price	Availability	Price
Out_of_Stock	National Pricing*	In_Stock	Regional Price

*Use realistic pricing ex. the pricing most common across states or areas.

There are 2 ways that you can provide your regional inventory data:

• Merchant center feed
• Content API

Using your Merchant Center feed

1. In your Merchant Center account, click Products.
2. Then, click Feeds.
3. Under “Supplemental feeds”, click Add product inventory feed.
4. Select Regional inventory as the feed type.

Note: For some accounts this may show as “inventory feed” rather than “regional inventory”.

5. Set fetch cadence for the feed.

Using the Content API

Review content API user guide for details.

If you plan to upload a large number of offers or make frequent changes to your product data, it’s recommended that you use the Content API to directly upload your product data.

Display ads

If you run Display ads and have a regional inventory feed, reach out to your Google sales representative to be allowlisted. If you aren’t allowlisted, Display ads won’t serve for offers with regional overrides.

In the US, when allowlisted, Display ads will support regional price and/or availability.

For Display ads outside the US, when allowlisted, Display ads will support the national price/availability (regional offer details won’t be shown outside the US). When allowlisted, follow these steps to update your feed:

1. Update primary feed.
   • For all products, set the availability [availability] attribute to in_stock and set national pricing (the price shown on the landing page for customers coming from Display ads).
2. Update regional feed.
   • For regionally available products, set availability [availability] attribute to out_of_stock for regions where your product isn’t offered online.
3. For regionally priced products, set price.
4. If your display ads are targeted to the US, follow the standard RAAP feed setup.

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.

Example

Value provided in the link attribute: https://mystorewebsite.com/p/myproductlandingpage

Final URL: https://mystorewebsite.com/p/myproductlandingpage?region_id=123456

Value provided in the link attribute: https://mystorewebsite.com/p?offer=myproduct

Final URL: https://mystorewebsite.com/p?offer=myproduct&region_id=123456

Note: Offers’ national price and availability are still going to be crawled and verified using the product page URL without a region ID. The values shown on your landing page for those national URLs must match the national price and availability of the offer. If your prices are purely regional, please set a realistic national offer price which reflects what your landing page shows when using the national URL.

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.