How To Submit Tax and Shipping Information to Google Base via SingleFeed December 1st, 2008
[This post assumes that you have product-specific tax or shipping rules. If you don’t, you can set global tax and shipping rules right in your Google Base account. Read this blog post for more info.]
Google Base now supports two new field for tax and shipping. Within your SingleFeed these are called “Google Tax” and “Google Shipping”, respectively. These fields are a little more complex than other fields, so bear with us on this. Since your tax and shipping rules are determined by various product-specific factors such as the tax rate of a particular item in a specific zip code, these fields support various sub-attributes that outline the particulars of your tax and shipping rules for that individual product.
The sub-attributes are:
For the “Google 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 SingleFeed “Google Tax” field, you specify all four of these attributes, separated 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 separate each tax group by a “,” like this: ”US:CA:9:n, US:OR:7:n”.
For the “Google 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 “Google Shipping” field abides by the same rules as the tax field: sub attributes must be separated by a colon (”:”); the colon must be included for all sub attributes; and attribute groups are separated by a comma. (”,”).
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”. Read this blog post for more info.