Google Merchant Center Introduces Automatic Shipping Updates

Google Merchant Center will introduce automatic shipping updates as a new automatic improvement feature. The goal of this tool is to improve product shipping information accuracy, allowing your customers to make accurate shipping time estimates and improve overall shipping performance.

The feature is currently limited to merchants located in the United States only. According to Google, “All auto shipping updates only apply to merchants in the U.S. Merchants outside the U.S. can allow this feature, but it will not take effect.”

How this works:

Automatic Shipping updates uses historical tracking data from associated partner accounts to enhance the accuracy of shipping information. The data includes:

• Crawled Shipping Speeds: Information taken directly from your website.
• Performance Shipping Speeds: Actual shipping speeds based on previous orders at various locations.

Using this data, Google’s system can reuse the shipping speed in the Merchant Center and update that speed automatically. This increases accuracy for shoppers, and improves conversions for merchants. To opt-in, merchants will need to link their accounts with a partner platform and authorize data sharing. The connection must start on the partner’s website and, once linked, they can turn on automatic updates for shipping in the Merchant Center.

PPC News Feed’s Hana Kobzová shared the announcement and created a mockup of what this feature could look like in the interface, as Google has not yet released official screenshots, and Hana said “Because shipping info often changes without warning, this will be beneficial.”