Question 1 — GMC Shipping Accuracy: “We have a large catalog where the majority of products ship within 24 hours, but a small subset of made-to-order items ship in 7-10 days. We recently enabled Google’s auto-update shipping policy. How do we ensure GMC is not applying the 7-10 day estimate to our fast-shipping products on Google Shopping listings heading into BFCM?”
In Merchant Center, split the made-to-order items into their own product group or feed label, then give that group its own shipping service with the 7-10 day handling time. The rest of the catalog can stay on the fast service.
Also make sure the fast-shipping products don’t mention the slower timeline anywhere in their product copy, collection copy, or shipping page if you can avoid it, because Google can still pick that up when it crawls the site.
Before BFCM, check a handful of live Shopping listings after the change and compare the shipping shown there against the product IDs you expect, just to make sure the split is actually sticking.
Hello Benjamin, thank you for the great question. I would setup a rule first for the shipping label attribute: Shipping label [shipping_label] - Google Merchant Center Help
The above method does not work, ie you can not use product groups or feed labels to define shipping pricing. The only way is using shipping labels.
The setup would be something like, if product contains custom, set shipping label to made-to-order.
Then set a second rule with no if statement with just a value for everything else.
To set this up have a look here: Set up your attribute rules - Google Merchant Center Help
Then in your shipping settings, setup shipping based on the labels. So you end up with 2 different shipping settings.
I would avoid using the automatic solution unless it is correct. Generally I find the automatic settings work ok, if the setup is simple. But once you have a bit more complexity, the automatic submissions tend to no longer work.
Hence why it is best to use Google Merchant Center attribute rules to setup your shipping labels.
Then setup your Google Merchant Center shipping settings using the shipping label.
Let me know if you have more questions.