Hi and welcome to PPC Problem Solvers. My name is Petra Manos and I’m from the Quantified Web. Now today’s topic is setting shipping rates. Now as you might have discovered if you have an e-commerce store the different shipping providers increase their fees all the time. Especially at the moment when there’s so many inflationary pressures going on. And what can happen is if your shipping rates get out of whack compared to what Google Merchant Centre thinks your shipping rate is then you might actually find that Google Merchant Centre disapproves your products and then your products are no longer showing in Google ads. So I had a client this morning let us know that because he was selling quite heavy items he’d had to go from free shipping for all of his items to free shipping for most items and $40 shipping for everything less than $500.
Well some items under $500. And actually it was a little bit tricky because it was only specific items under $500 that were affected by this change because there were some items that were heavier than others and the shipping rate was going to be quite expensive for those. When this type of thing occurs what you need to do is go into Merchant Centre and you need to have a look at what your shipping settings are. So in Merchant Centre there’s a whole section in there called shipping settings and what it will do is it will come up and you can set in there exactly what the price is for all of your inventory. Now in this particular example because we had pretty much all of the products were free shipping and then one subset of the products was $40 shipping. What we had to do is create a a feed rule to specify a new shipping label. So if you’ve never heard of these terms certainly look it up see what you can find about Google Merchant Centre also here at the Quantified Web we can do that for you but essentially this is what we needed to do. So to fix this particular problem we had to go in and we we go into the feed itself.
We edit that feed by creating a feed rule and in this case had to go in and create a feed rule that said that if it was a particular subset of products you can check to see if the title has a particular name for example so if it’s particular subset of products and the price was less than $500 in this case then we’re going to set a shipping label and the shipping label is a particular string that we choose so doesn’t really matter what string you pick as long as you know what it is and then from that point you can go into the shipping settings and you would say that for that shipping label then the shipping price is A and for everything else the shipping price is B. Everything with the shipping label was $40 and everything without the shipping label was free. Now by having this problem solved the client was able to maintain all of their products in Merchant Centre, not disapprovals.
The last thing we want is products to be disapproved just before Black Friday and other seasonal holidays but certainly don’t shy away from making these changes because having customers pay shipping when items that are inexpensive but weigh a lot makes a large difference to your profit margin. Alrighty well that’s how we solve that particular problem and now if you want to reach out to us we are the Quantified Web. I’m Petra Manos and feel free to subscribe in order to catch up on more updates about how we solve different problems.