Google Shopping Ads require people that run advertising to provide a shipping price for each of their products when they upload their SKU list into their platform.
They do this so that people can't list their product for a lower price to make the advert more attractive, but then charge higher shipping to make up for it later.
If you provide inaccurate rates to Google Shopping, and they do check, then your adverts can be blocked or banned.
The Problem
If you're offering free shipping, or a simple flat rate, then giving Google your freight rates is easy.
But, if you move to a live rate system where you're dynamically generating your freight costs based on the product and all your available carriers - such as using a Machship Live Pricing integration - then it becomes more challenging as every single product has a different shipping price to every postcode, and these prices are changing whenever your rates change.
The Solution
The best solution for this depends on how many SKUs that you have.
The solution to this issue is to use the Machship Bulk Quote Report function.
This report allows you to update a spreadsheet, where each line contains:
- From Location
- To Location
- Items
It will then produce an output file for you that includes the cheapest price you have available across all your carriers and services.
To generate a file for your use case, you would need to:
- Generate a template from with your FROM warehouse, and a TO Location in every zone
- Replicate these lines for every SKU you offer
If you had 500 zones, and 1,000 products, then your sheet would end up with 500,000 rows.
This can be uploaded to Machship, ideally outside of business hours, and the output with be a rate table you could upload to Google Shopping for your products.
For more information on how to use the Bulk Quote Report, see our help article here: