Google Shopping Live Pricing

• Overview
• The Challenge
• The Solution
• Implementation Steps
• Additional Resources

Overview

Google Shopping Ads require advertisers to provide accurate shipping prices for each of their products when uploading their SKU list to the platform. This requirement ensures that advertisers can't list their products at artificially low prices to make the adverts more attractive while compensating with higher shipping costs later. Providing inaccurate rates to Google Shopping can result in blocked or banned advertisements.

The Challenge

While providing freight rates for Google Shopping is straightforward for businesses offering free shipping or simple flat rates, it becomes more complex when using a live rate system. With dynamic freight cost generation based on the product and available carriers - such as a MachShip Live Pricing integration - each product has a different shipping price to every postcode, and these prices change whenever carrier rates are updated.

The Solution

The optimal solution depends on the number of SKUs you have. MachShip offers a Bulk Quote Report function to address this challenge effectively.

The Bulk Quote Report allows you to update a spreadsheet where each line contains:

1. From Location
2. To Location
3. Items

The report then produces an output file with the cheapest price available across all your carriers and services.

Implementation Steps

To generate a file for your use case:

1. Create a template with your FROM warehouse and a TO Location in every zone.
2. Replicate these lines for every SKU you offer.

For example, if you have 500 zones and 1,000 products, your sheet would contain 500,000 rows.

Additional Resources

For more detailed information on how to use the Bulk Quote Report, refer to our help article:

How to Use the Bulk Quote Report

Best Practices

1. Timing: Upload your data to MachShip ideally outside of business hours to minimize impact on system performance.
2. Frequency: Update your Google Shopping feed regularly to ensure accuracy, especially after any changes to your product catalog or shipping rates.
3. Validation: Periodically check a sample of your Google Shopping listings to ensure the displayed shipping rates match your expectations.
4. Zones: Consider grouping postcodes into zones to reduce the number of unique combinations and simplify your data management.

By leveraging MachShip's Bulk Quote Report function, you can efficiently generate accurate shipping rates for your Google Shopping feed, ensuring compliance with Google's requirements and providing transparent pricing to your potential customers.