Google today published a tutorial video explaining how Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP) and regional shipping work together inside Google Merchant Center, walking through the full configuration workflow for merchants who sell products where price, stock status, or delivery costs vary by location. The video, posted on May 6, 2026, to the Google Ads YouTube channel - which has 870,000 subscribers - carries the title "How to Use Regional Pricing & Shipping in Merchant Center" and runs approximately six minutes and fifty seconds.

The tutorial addresses a specific operational challenge. According to the video, "if your business manages products where price, stock status, or shipping costs fluctuate based on location, this video is for you." That framing covers a wide range of e-commerce scenarios: food retailers whose wholesale pricing differs by geography, regional businesses that only ship to certain states, and larger merchants whose delivery speeds change depending on warehouse proximity.

What RAAP does and why it matters

RAAP handles online inventory. It is distinct from Local Inventory Ads (LIA), which the tutorial describes as a format used to "showcase your local products and brick and mortar store information to nearby shoppers searching with Google." RAAP, by contrast, applies to what the video calls "your online inventory." The two features serve different commercial purposes, though they share the same underlying geographic infrastructure.

The core mechanism behind both RAAP and regional shipping is the concept of a region - a defined geographic area built from postal codes or states and provinces. According to the video, "a region is a specific geographic area you define by postal codes or states and provinces." The significance of this definition lies in reuse: a merchant creates one set of region IDs and applies them across both inventory overrides and shipping configurations, rather than maintaining two separate geographic structures for different parts of the same product system.

According to the tutorial, "the good news is you can define one set of regions and use them for both regional inventory and pricing and shipping delivery zones." That consolidation has practical implications. A merchant whose shipping zones already reflect their warehouse footprint can use those exact same zones to govern which products appear, and at what price, within each geographic cluster. The video characterizes this as streamlining "your setup and management."

The business benefit follows from precision. According to the video, the shared region approach allows merchants to "promote inventory that's not only correctly priced and in stock, but also available to ship with accurate regional costs and speeds." At the paid search level, this translates into ads being shown only where the product can actually be fulfilled - paying "only for clicks where products are available and shippable within your custom regions."

Activating the regions add-on

The first step in the configuration process, according to the tutorial, is activating the regions add-on inside Merchant Center. This step creates unique region IDs. The video describes these IDs as "the very same region definitions you'll use for both RAAP and for setting up regional shipping costs and transit times."

Once regions are defined, a supplemental inventory feed carries the override data. According to the tutorial, merchants use this feed to "set in stock or out of stock status and price for products within each region ID to set up regional availability and pricing." The feed structure allows for partial overrides rather than full catalog rewrites. The setup varies depending on what differs by geography.

The tutorial outlines three distinct configurations. If inventory and pricing are national but availability is regional, only the availability field needs to be overridden in the supplemental feed. If availability is national but pricing is regional, the feed overrides pricing only. The video notes that "the setup will depend on your business needs," which is a way of saying the feature is modular rather than all-or-nothing.

A third element in the RAAP configuration involves landing page behavior. According to the tutorial, "Google appends the region ID corresponding to the location of the shopper as a parameter to the click through URL." Merchants must accept this appended parameter and use it to render a product page showing the price and availability that matches what was displayed in the Shopping ad. A mismatch between the ad and the landing page constitutes a policy violation. According to the video, "price in cart on the landing page is a violation of our crawling policies."

Regional shipping configuration

Regional shipping uses the same region definitions established for RAAP, but it is a separate feature with its own setup path. According to the tutorial, merchants can "set up different shipping speeds and costs based on customer locations using these same regions." The configuration allows a merchant to specify, for example, that two-day delivery applies to customers in the northeast while five-day delivery applies to customers in rural western states.

The feature extends to the product data level. The tutorial notes that merchants can apply predefined account-level regions for shipping at the offer level by using the location group name attribute within the shipping attribute in their product data. This means shipping behavior can be controlled per product rather than only at the account level - a granularity that matters for merchants whose product catalog includes items with different fulfillment profiles, such as bulky goods that ship differently from standard parcels.

Country support for regional shipping and RAAP does not overlap entirely. According to the video, "some countries may support RAAP, but not regional shipping or vice versa." The tutorial directs merchants to a Help Center article to verify which countries support regional shipping before building a configuration that assumes both features are available in a given market.

Errors and enforcement

The tutorial's discussion of errors is specific and worth close attention. A product disapproved for mismatched regional pricing or mismatched regional availability is removed from all regions - not just the one where the mismatch was detected. According to the video, "an item disapproved for mismatched regional pricing or mismatched regional availability will not be served in any region, not just the one where the mismatch was found." That enforcement approach means a configuration error in a single state can take a product offline nationally.

Overlapping regions with conflicting data present a different problem. The tutorial notes that while no error is necessarily surfaced to the merchant, Google will simply pick one of the conflicting values. According to the video, "Google will simply select one and it's not guaranteed which one will be displayed." Merchants who have multiple regions with postal code overlap and different prices assigned to each should expect unpredictable output rather than an explicit warning.

For technical errors at scale - specifically the errors described in the video as "too many regional overrides" or "overcapacity" - the tutorial recommends contacting Google support directly with screenshots. These are not errors that resolve through feed adjustments alone.

Context for the marketing community

The release of this tutorial sits within a broader period of sustained change to Merchant Center's feature set. Google has been adding geographic and audience-based controls to the platform at pace. In March 2026, Google expanded its loyalty program features to 14 countries, including an extension of loyalty annotations to regional Shopping ads - a move that intersects directly with the regional infrastructure described in this tutorial. Merchants who want loyalty pricing to appear within regional Shopping ads need correctly configured region IDs for that integration to function.

Earlier in January 2026, Google announced that merchants managing the same product online and in physical stores would need to use separate product IDs when attributes like price or availability differ by channel, with enforcement beginning in March 2026. That rule affects any merchant combining RAAP overrides with local inventory - the supplemental feed carrying regional price overrides must reference product IDs that are correctly separated between online and in-store versions.

The April 2026 mandate requiring pickup cost and minimum order value attributes for UK and EEA merchants adds yet another layer of regional specificity to Merchant Center data requirements, effective September 30, 2026. Merchants configuring regional shipping for European markets need to account for these attribute requirements alongside any existing RAAP setups.

Also in March 2026, Google launched Merchant Center for Agencies in the United States and Canada, giving digital marketing firms a consolidated dashboard for managing multiple client accounts. Agencies responsible for clients with regionally differentiated product catalogs - food manufacturers, regional retailers, or businesses with state-specific regulatory constraints - would be the first affected by the RAAP configuration requirements described in this tutorial.

The feed management dimension of all this is significant. As PPC Land reported in September 2025 when Microsoft launched global supplemental feeds for Merchant Center, the broader industry has been moving toward partial-override feed architectures that allow targeted attribute updates without reprocessing entire catalogs. Google's RAAP implementation follows this pattern: supplemental feeds carrying regional overrides sit on top of primary feeds that carry national defaults.

At the same time, Google Merchant Center quietly added an AI product import beta on May 5, 2026, allowing merchants to populate listings from a one-time AI scan of their website. The AI import route makes no provision for regional pricing overrides - it reads what is present on the page at the time of the scan. Merchants who need RAAP configurations would still need to build supplemental feeds manually, making the technical workflow described in this tutorial relevant even as the platform adds simpler onboarding options.

Practical implications

The RAAP and regional shipping system is designed for a specific merchant profile: businesses that operate across a geographically differentiated market where price, availability, or delivery capability is not uniform. Food manufacturers, regional wholesale distributors, companies with zoned distribution contracts, and retailers with limited shipping reach all fit this profile.

The key constraint remains the landing page. Building regional price overrides in a supplemental feed is technically straightforward. Ensuring that the landing page dynamically reads the appended region ID parameter and renders the correct price is a development task. According to the tutorial, the merchant "must adjust your landing pages so that they can accept this parameter, and render a product landing page that shows the corresponding price and availability." That requirement means the feature is not available to merchants on platforms that do not support dynamic URL parameters at the product page level.

Fast shipping configurations require additional care. According to the video, "if you're setting up fast shipping, ensure your regional availability settings are accounted for to maintain accuracy across your offerings." A merchant promoting next-day delivery in a specific region through a shipping configuration must also ensure the RAAP availability settings for that region show the product as in stock. The two features are linked in their output to the shopper but configured through separate workflows within the platform.

The consistent emphasis across the tutorial is accuracy - accuracy between what the Shopping ad displays and what the landing page shows, accuracy between shipping speeds and actual availability, and accuracy in the geographic definitions that underpin the entire system. Errors are not merely cosmetic; they result in product disapprovals that can eliminate impressions across an entire country, not just the region where the mismatch occurred.

Timeline

  • June 2018 - Google launches local catalog ads on mobile Display, with local inventory ads available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, UK, and US. PPC Land
  • December 2024 - Google Merchant Center adds first-order discount option, expanding promotional tools within the platform. PPC Land
  • April 8, 2025 - Google announces updates to the Merchant Center product data specification, including changes to shipping attributes and installment pricing. PPC Land
  • September 17, 2025 - Microsoft launches global supplemental feeds for Merchant Center, enabling partial product catalog overrides without full rereuploads. PPC Land
  • January 6, 2026 - Google announces that merchants must use separate product IDs for online and in-store versions of the same product when attributes differ, with enforcement beginning March 2026. PPC Land
  • March 6, 2026 - A former agency closes a client's Google Merchant Center account, deleting all product feeds, supplemental feeds, and account links. PPC Land
  • March 11, 2026 - Google launches Merchant Center for Agencies in the United States and Canada. PPC Land
  • March 25, 2026 - Google expands loyalty program features to 14 countries and extends annotations to regional Shopping ads. PPC Land
  • April 8, 2026 - Google updates Merchant Center documentation to clarify that using the same product IDs across multiple accounts is acceptable. PPC Land
  • April 28, 2026 - Google announces that pickup cost and minimum order value attributes become mandatory for UK and EEA merchants starting September 30, 2026. PPC Land
  • May 5, 2026 - Google Merchant Center adds an AI product import beta that performs a one-time website scan to create product listings without a structured feed. PPC Land
  • May 6, 2026 - Google Ads publishes "How to Use Regional Pricing & Shipping in Merchant Center" on YouTube, explaining the full RAAP and regional shipping configuration workflow.

Summary

Who: Google Ads, through its YouTube channel with 870,000 subscribers, directed at e-commerce merchants, feed managers, and digital marketing practitioners who manage product catalogs with geographic variation in price, availability, or shipping costs.

What: A six-minute and fifty-second tutorial video explaining how Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP) and regional shipping work together inside Google Merchant Center, covering region definition by postal code or state, supplemental feed setup, landing page parameter requirements, and error handling for mismatched regional data.

When: Published on May 6, 2026, on the Google Ads YouTube channel. The video had accumulated 145 views at the time of its discovery, consistent with a same-day publication.

Where: The tutorial is hosted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilJoAKCEZ30. The features it describes - RAAP and regional shipping - are configured inside Google Merchant Center. Country support for each feature varies and must be verified in the Merchant Center Help Center before implementation.

Why: Regional pricing, availability, and shipping accuracy directly affects ad spend efficiency. Products disapproved for mismatched regional data are removed from all regions, not just the one where the mismatch occurred. Merchants whose products are only available in parts of a country, or whose prices and delivery speeds differ by geography, need these tools to avoid paying for clicks in areas where orders cannot be fulfilled or where displayed prices do not match what shoppers see on the landing page.

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