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.