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What does it mean when you see “Published, Searchable Soon” in your Google Base account? 

This question crops up a lot… and for good reason. Your Google Base account doesn’t do a good job of telling you what’s going on here. When you see this message it means that your most recently uploaded Google Base feed is being indexed for search on Google Base. What it neglects to underscore is the fact that your previously uploaded (penultimate) feed IS still searchable on Google Base. So if you see “Published, Searchable soon”, your items (from the previously processed feed) are still live and searchable on Google Base. 

Sometimes merchants complain that their feed is in a perpetual state of “Published, searchable soon”. Their concern is that if their items are in this state constantly, they are never searchable on Base. If you see this message continually, i.e. for more than 24 hours at a time, it is likely because you upload your feed on a daily basis and: 

1) You have a very large feed (50,000+ items) and/or 

2) Google is experiencing slowdowns with feed processing. 

If you upload a feed on a daily basis, either of the above points could cause your Google Base account to perpetually display the “Published, Searchable Soon” message as Google’s feed processing overlaps into your upload schedule. Some merchants first reaction is to simply stop uploading their feed daily. This is not advisable for a couple of reasons. First, as mentioned previously, even with your current feed in this “Published, Searchable Soon” state, your previously uploaded feed is still searchable, so there’s no reason to stop delivering your feed daily. Second, by sending Google base your feed on a daily basis, you’re allowing Google to make sure your data is fresh. 

As a Google Product Search Approved Partner, SingleFeed recognizes that daily feed submission is optimal. 

How do you do it? Easy! Google Base now supports two new fields, “tax” and “shipping” (SingleFeed now supports these fields under the moniker “Google Tax” and “Google Shipping”). These fields are a little more complex than other fields, so bear with me on this. Since your tax and shipping rules are determined by various factors such as a state-specific tax rate, or the destination of a package, these fields support sub-attributes to outline the specifics of your tax and shipping rules.  

The sub-attributes are: 

For the “tax” field: 

1. “country” – The Country an item is taxed in. (Optional) 

2. “region” – The geographic region a tax rate is applied to. (Optional) 

3. “rate” – The tax rate. (Required) 

4. “tax_ship” – Whether or not you charge tax on any shipping fees. (Optional) 

Within your Google Base “tax” field, you specify all four of these attributes, seperated by a colon (”:”), which acts as the delimiter. If you want to omit one of the optional attributes, no problem, you just need to include the “:” so Google can still read the string of information. So a tax rate of 9% for California, where tax is not applied to the shipping fee, would be specificed as: “US:CA:9:n”. What if you charge a different tax rate for a different tax region? No problem. You can include multiple tax attribute groups within this field also. Just seperate each tax group by a “,” like this: ”US:CA:9:n, US:OR:7:n”. 

For the “shipping” field, there are also four sub-attributes: 

1. “country” – The country an item will ship to. (Optional) 

2. “region” – The geographic region a shipping rate applies to. (Optional) 

3. “service” – The service class or speed. (Optional) 

4. “price” – The shipping price. (Required) 

The shipping field abides by the same rules as the tax field: sub attributes must be separated by a colon (”:”) and the colon must be included for all sub attributes; attribute groups are separated by a comma. (”,”). If you’re a SingleFeed merchant, know that we are already mapping your “shipping cost” field to the “Google Shipping” field. Fill in the “Google Shipping” field only if you have additional, product-specific shipping information. 

If this sounds all too complicated, don’t worry. You can also submit your tax and shipping rules from within your Google Base account. Just log in to your Google Base account, click on “Settings”, then “Tax and Shipping Settings”.

Google recently announced that you can now submit tax and shipping information about your products to Google Base via your Google Base account. They have begun to display this valuable information to shoppers on Google Product Search! This is great for shoppers as it gives them a better idea of their final purchase price, and will likely lead to more qualified traffic to your store. Submitting this information does require a little bit of work, but Google has made it pretty easy and flexible. You can either set default shipping and tax rules right in your Google base account, or you can override those settings by submitting shipping and tax information on a product-level within your data feed (or via the Google Base API). What’s the best approach?

We recommend setting your shipping and tax rules in your Google Base account. This is the easiest way to do it, and will suffice for most merchants. For tax, you can enter tax rate values per state, or you can let Google know what states you charge tax in and they’ll estimate the tax for shoppers. 

For shipping, you can set a flat rate for all products (or specify free shipping); set shipping costs based on a table (such as the number of items, total weight, or cart price); or have Google automatically calculate shipping based on a carrier rate (UPS, FedExm USPS).

As mentioned this will work for most merchants. If you need to submit item-specific tax and shipping rates, you’ll need to do that via the data feed you submit to Google, or via the Google Base API. You can get our take on this here, or just check out Google’s article. Whichever you decide, we recommend that you begin submitting this information to Google Base as soon as possible so they can start to provide better data about your products to potential buyers. This should get you more qualified traffic from Google Product Search.