Anyone else out there have a variable flat rate shipping cost per item in their store? How do you handle shipping in Google's Merchant Center?

Let me give you an example:

Item 1 = $65 for the product and $12 to ship.
Item 2 = $125 for the product and $28 to ship.

The shipping costs are set by my supplier. When I include the shipping cost in my XML feed, I get an error and my products get bounced. When I remove the shipping costs, my products get listed, but Google shows "free shipping" and I get upset prospective buyers.

Any suggestions on how to remedy this?

Bill

I Google merchant, you can mimic your shipping rates and it's quite flexible.

Have you tried that?

Google will (eventually) visit your site and check the shipping to see if it's correct.
You will suddenly get a lot of abandoned carts from John Smith.
If your shipping rates are not equal or lower than your shopping ads, they will kill your feed until it's fixed.

Thanks,
David

David,

I have the option of setting shipping bands by price or by product weight, but not on a per-item basis.

Bill

Sorry Bill, based on your initial post, I was guessing shipping was based on pricing.
So you are saying that each item has it's own shipping cost and is unrelated to the weight or the price?

Are using Mike Beebe's feed generator?

Thanks,
David

Yes and yes.

Mike was good enough to edit his generator to include the shipping cost per item.

That's when google removed all my products.

Bill

Hi Bill, I see.
Did Google say specifically why they removed them?
I am thinking that maybe because the price submitted in the feed is not the same as what shows when landing on the product detail page of your site.

Thanks,
David

David,

Google said it was because I didn't specify shipping, even though I did.

And now I can't specify shipping because it doesn't match my site.

I am at a loss here and the reduced staffing at Google isn't responding.

Bill

Hi Bill, I have been poking around, looking for a solution for you.
This page seems to explain things - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069284?hl=en

As it mentions, your actual shipping can be less, but not more that what is used in Google merchant.

I'm not sure if this will work, but you could look through your products and get an idea of the maximum (percentage) that shipping is, and set that up in google, then submit the feed without shipping.

For example, the ones you used before

Item 1 = $65 for the product and $12 to ship.
Item 2 = $125 for the product and $28 to ship.

Item 1 = 18.46%
Item 2 = 22.4%

So in that case, you setup 22.4% as the shipping in Google.

Again, I am not sure if that helps, but it should get your feed listed until you can talk to Google about supplying correct shipping pricing.

Thanks,
David

Thanks for the research, David!

I found this as well:

Syntax
shipping uses 4 sub-attributes:

country (optional)
ISO 3166 country code
region or postal_#8203;code or location_#8203;id or location_group_name (optional)
service (optional)
Service class or shipping speed
price (required)
Fixed shipping cost, including VAT if required

So a little, "FIND AND REPLACE" in the XML file and I uploaded the product list again showing this as my shipping field: US:CA:Ground:PRICE USD

Right now all products are live. I'll check in the morning to see if the shipping cost is shown correctly.

If not, I'm using your solution!!!



Bill