When online shoppers are ready to buy a product, estimated shipping costs can help them decide where they want to purchase. Shipping cost estimation is one of the features most commonly requested by Google Product Search users, and it offers merchants who offer free or low-cost shipping a way to attract more customers. Today, I’m happy to announce that merchants in the UK and Germany can now submit shipping information in two complementary ways. You can:
1. Set default values directly in your Google Merchant Center account. The rates and values you set will serve as the default values for all your items. You can input these values on the “Tax and Shipping settings” tab under “Settings” in your account.
2. Include values for the shipping attribute in your data feeds. These values will override any account-level default values that you have set for that item.
Where possible we recommend using both settings: create a default shipping method on the account level and add the item-level shipping attribute for products with more detailed information.
We will be making shipping cost information available to UK users in the near future (it’s already live in Germany), so we strongly recommend adding this data to your account and your feed soon.
Please visit our Help Center for step-by-step instructions and more information on formatting the shipping attributes.
