Setup Google Ads and Merchant Center with custom shipping rates by weight & zipcode?
I’m having a hard time setting up Google Ads for my store. G Ads pulls the product database from the Merchant Center, and GMC is rejecting the feed due to missing shipping costs.
Our site uses the ‘Carrier Accounts’ shipping option to calculate customised shipping costs at checkout based on the products weight and customer zipcode. Each one is different, and can’t find a way to enter that in a way that GMC approves it.
To makes things even more interesting, our market is USA but we ship from Canada. The Shopify/UPS carrier integration provides rates on the spot at checkout time (even using our negotiated rates).
Has anyone found a workaround for this?
Thanks
The short answer is:
The discrepancy you’re experiencing is a common challenge when Shopify’s Carrier Accounts (which pull negotiated, real-time UPS rates via the Shopify API) do not sync perfectly with Google Merchant Center’s (GMC) own carrier rate calculations.
GMC’s system pulls a non-negotiated, standard carrier rate from its connected carriers, leading to a mismatch that causes product disapprovals.
The most robust, technical, and actionable solution is to completely bypass the automatic syncing and manually configure highly detailed, multi-tiered shipping tables within the GMC using the Merchant API (formerly Content API for Shopping).
This allows you to set up rules based on shipping_weight (which must be correctly submitted in your product feed, likely via the Shopify API to GMC) and postal code groups to accurately represent the complex weight and destination-based rates, including a rate modifier to account for your negotiated Canadian-to-US shipping discounts or surcharges, ensuring compliance and cost-effectiveness.
The long answer is:
The core issue lies in the reliance on the automatic carrier-calculated rate matching between your store and GMC, which fails for custom-negotiated or international carrier rates.
The Shopify/UPS integration uses the Shopify API to provide the live, discounted rate at checkout, but GMC’s carrier-calculated shipping feature pulls a public, undiscounted UPS rate for the US market, despite your Canadian origin.
To solve this, you must disable the automatic shipping import in your Shopify Google & YouTube app and take manual control via an API-driven solution to ensure compliance and prevent future disapprovals.
The recommended approach is leveraging the Merchant API’s shippingsettings service.
This API service allows you to programmatically define Account-Level Shipping Services with the granularity needed to mirror your complex weight and location-based rules, which is far more efficient than doing it manually in the GMC UI, especially for a large number of postal codes or weight tiers.
You would use the shippingsettings service to define a new shipping service for the US market (the target country), setting your origin postal code (Canada) and choosing the UPS carrier service.
Crucially, you can then use the API to apply a rate adjustment modifier (a flat amount or percentage) to the carrier-calculated rates, which serves as the workaround to account for your negotiated UPS rates and the complexity of shipping from Canada to the US.
This technical integration, typically handled by a custom application or a middleware platform running on a service like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), is cost-effective because it prevents listing disapprovals, keeps your ads running, and ensures customers see accurate shipping costs, which is critical for conversion rates.
You must also ensure that your product feed, whether through the Shopify API or another feed management solution, correctly populates the shipping_weight and potentially the shipping_label attributes for each product, as these fields are essential for GMC to apply the correct calculated rate from your API-defined shipping service.
The use of the Merchant API is a cost-effective choice because it scales effortlessly, allowing for immediate and accurate updates to your shipping logic without requiring you to use expensive, third-party feed management software that may still struggle with the complexity of your international, weight-and-zipcode dynamic rates.
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