Delivery speed plays a vital role in customers’ purchasing decisions. So, it is important to make sure that, when customers see your products on Google, you are presenting them with the best delivery speed estimates that you can. 

In our experience, however, most businesses use only the standard delivery speed configuration in Google Merchant Center, meaning that they enter a range for handling time (such as, 0 to 1 days) and range for transit time (such as, 3 to 5 days). To all potential customers, Google then displays the sum of each maximum value as their delivery speed (such as, 1+5 = 6 days). In other words, the customers that are just down the street from your fulfillment center see the same delivery speed as those who are hundreds of miles away.

Simprosys has teamed up with Google to offer an alternative approach to delivery speed estimates via our Feed for Google Shopping app. Now, simply by linking to your Simprosys account from Google Merchant Center, you can show potential customers more accurate estimates for their locations and for the products they’re viewing on Google, which may increase your likelihood of conversion.   

Where are Simprosys-linked, Google-calculated delivery speed estimates available?

The new delivery speed estimates are available for products that are shipped from and delivered to addresses in the United States. Cross-border shipping is not supported at this time. 

Who should use this feature?

We recommend that all businesses that ship products in the eligible regions use this feature. 

How do delivery speed estimates work?

Once you have linked your account, Simprosys sends Google your recent order tracking data, including the following information for each package:

• Products included and their quantities 
• Order handling time
• Origin and destination postal codes
• Parcel carrier, like FedEx, and service level, like Ground
• Shipping cost paid by customer
• Tracking number            
   

Google uses the tracking numbers you provide to gather tracking events from parcel carriers (for example, when a package is picked up or a delivery attempt is made). Then, it processes the information from you/Simprosys and from the parcel carriers before feeding it into a set of machine learning models that generate delivery speed estimates for your products across postal codes.   

Because Google’s estimates are based on your past performance, they should be a good representation of what your normal operations are capable of delivering -- not overly aggressive or conservative.   

What are the benefits of using delivery speed estimates?

As stated above, the main benefit of this feature is being able to present customers with realistic delivery speeds based on their locations and the products they’re viewing. These speeds are communicated to potential customers through a number of new shipping annotations, for example, statements like “Get it by Nov 5” or “Free delivery by Mon, Dec 20 ”.

Second, by participating in this program, it should be easier to obtain free and fast shipping annotations on Google (program details): When you participate, Google maps where your participating products ship quickly to within the country, saving you the time and resources required to make those calculations and configure [regions] and [transit_time_label]s in Google Merchant Center. Additionally, Google’s mapping updates as its criteria change (for example, when it relaxes “fast” requirements around the holidays) or your network changes. So, you don’t have to worry about maintaining a complex shipping configuration either.

In order to obtain the free and fast annotations, participants must still meet the following additional criteria:

• Ensure that one of your shipping services is free or free for purchases over a certain cost
• Activate web conversion tracking on your Google Ads account (instructions)
• Match the wording of the shipping information on your landing and checkout pages to Google’s wording (details)

When you have linked to your Simprosys account from Merchant Center (details below) and completed the additional steps for the free and fast annotation, please fill out this form to start an approval review.

How do I link to my Simprosys account from Google Merchant Center?

Section 1 - Upgrading the permissions granted to Simprosys’s Feed for Google Shopping app

First, you will need to upgrade the permissions that Shopify grants to your Simprosys app in order for Simprosys to read and send order tracking data to Google:

1. Using the Shopify account of the Store Owner or any user with Admin privileges, log in to Shopify here            
    
2. Open the Simprosys app from the Shopify store admin panel            
    
3. Hover over the Settings Menu to expose & click on “Google-Calculated Delivery Speed Estimates.” You will be directed to the “Google-Calculated Delivery Speed Estimates” page, which will display a prompt for you to upgrade the permissions of your Simprosys app:
   1. Click the “Upgrade App Permissions” button. You will then be presented with a permissions-upgrade page in Shopify, which details the permissions that the Simprosys app will have after the upgrade process.  The new permission you are granting here is “View Orders.”            
       
   2. Click the “Update App” button in the bottom right to accept the updated permissions. Once done, you’ll be redirected to the “Google-Calculated Delivery Speed Estimates” page in the Simprosys app (now displaying its usual form instead of the upgrade prompt).     
      
      
      
      

1. Finish up by clicking the “Enable Order Tracking Data Submission” slider button.
   1. Once you do that, a warning message will appear, informing you that order tracking data syncing will not occur until you have also linked to Simprosys from Google Merchant Center.  This warning message will go away after you complete the steps below.            
       
2. Click the “Save” button. You can now leave the Simprosys app.

Section 2 - Determining if you meet the shipping speed prerequisite on Google Merchant Center

Second, since Google will not show its own delivery speed estimates unless you are already configured to display shipping speeds to customers in Google Merchant Center, we need to confirm that you are able to do that.  In other words, you should have at least one of the following methods set up and active:            
 

• A standard shipping service, with the optional fields “order cutoff time”, “order cutoff time timezone,” “handling time,” and “fulfilled days” (for handling time) provided (learn more)            
   
• A Google-calculated shipping service, based on your parcel carriers and ship-from locations (learn more)            
   
• The [shipping] attribute configured to display speeds from the offer-level, meaning it has at least the following sub-attributes provided for a national service: [country], [price], [min_handling_time], [max_handling_time], [min_transit_time], and [max_transit_time] (learn more)            
   

We believe the third method -- using the shipping attribute to configure shipping at the offer level -- is still relatively uncommon for our customers. So, in this section, we will focusing on identifying if you fall into one of the first two categories or if you don’t yet have a shipping service:

1. Log in to Google Merchant Center here
2. Visit the “Shipping & returns” page here

1. Look at the “Shipping services” section in the middle of the page.  If you do not have at least one shipping service with the following characteristics, you need to set one up.  Move on to Section 3B below.  Otherwise, you need to do some additional checks.  Proceed to the next step.
   1. Green dot indicating that the service is active
   2. Area includes “United States” (it may include others)
   3. Delivery type is “To an address”            
       
2. Since you have a shipping service that has potential, you can now check that it is actually serving delivery speeds to customers. Click on the service name to view a summary page.             
    
3. Check the “Delivery Time” section of the summary. If you see…
   1. …the headings “Ship from locations” and “Carrier services”, you have a shipping service with delivery speeds.  Move on to Section 3A.
   2. …the headings “Destinations” and “Transit time”, you need to investigate further. Click on the pencil icon to the right of the row.            
       
4. In the configuration screen that loads, look for the section with “Order Cutoff Time” and “Handling time”

1. If you have already filled in values for the cutoff time, cutoff timezone, handling time, and fulfilled days, click the back arrow by the Google Merchant Center logo in the top left corner to exit without making changes.  You have confirmed that this shipping service can display delivery speeds to customers.  You can move on to Section 3A.            
    
2. If any of those values have not been filled in, you can do so now to enable that shipping service to display delivery speeds to customers:            
   
   
   1. The order cutoff time is the time after which orders will no longer be processed that day.  An additional day will be added to the delivery estimate for orders placed after this time.
      1. If you do not know your cutoff time, a safe guess is usually 2PM in your fulfillment facilities local timezone.  If you have multiple facilities, enter the cutoff time of the facility that closes soonest.            
          
   2. The handling time is the number of days it takes you to fulfill an order once it has been placed.  
      1. If you fulfill an order placed before the cutoff time the same day, make your handling time 0 to 0.            
          
   3. The fulfilled days are the days that your facility operates to fulfill packages.            
       
3. Once all that information has been added, your shipping service will display delivery speeds to customers.  Click “Next” then click “Save”.  Move on to Section 3A.

Section 3A - Linking to Simprosys via the data verification process

If, in Section 2, you determined that you do have a way to display delivery speeds to customers, we recommend that you use shipping data verification to link to your Simprosys account from Google Merchant Center:

1. If you are not currently logged in to Merchant Center, do so here
2. Click here to enter the shipping data verification process
3. Select Simprosys
4. Click on “Link your Simprosys account”
5. Enter your Simprosys account ID that you wrote down in Section 1
6. Click “Link your account”
7. After you see a message confirming the link, click “Save” 

The Google Help Center article for shipping data verification is here.

Section 3B - Creating a Simprosys-linked shipping service

If, in Section 2, you determined that you do not have a way to display delivery speeds to customers, we recommend that you create a new shipping service based on your order tracking data provided by Simprosys:

1. If you are not currently logged in to Merchant Center, do so here            
    
2. Click here to enter the shipping setup process            
    
3. In the “Service coverage” section…
   1. Enter a name for your shipping service, like “Simprosys - Ground Svc - US”
   2. Select only the United States as the country 
   3. Select USD as the currency
   4. Click “Next”            
       
4. In the “Delivery times” section…
   1. Select “Show custom delivery times based on your carrier or partner”
   2. Select “Your shipping data from partners”
   3. Select Simprosys
   4. Click on “Link your Simprosys Account”
   5. Enter your Simprosys account ID that you wrote down in Section 1
   6. Click “Link your account”
   7. Once you have linked your account, confirm that the backup delivery times that Google has suggested are reasonable for your business.  Note that Google will use these delivery times until it has sufficient data to calculate your delivery estimates.
   8. Click “Next”            
       
5. In the “Shipping cost” section…
   1. Choose how you’d like to charge customers for shipping
   2. Click “Save”            
       

The Google Help Center article for partner-linked, Google-calculated shipping services is here.

Section 4 - A note about the [shipping] attribute

One reason that you may not have a shipping service listed on the “Shipping & returns” page is that you use the [shipping] attribute’s [pricing] sub-attribute to indicate shipping cost at the offer level.  When you do this, offer-level shipping information overrides your account-level shipping service.  So, unless you also use the [shipping] attribute to set a shipping speed (a relatively new feature), your use of the [pricing] sub-attribute will prevent your account-level shipping service from displaying delivery speeds.  That will, in turn, prevent Google from displaying delivery estimates.  To fix the issue, you should remove the price information from the [shipping] attribute for the products you’d like to use Google-calculated delivery estimates OR fully implement offer-level shipping, including speeds.

NOTE - For the [shipping] attribute to be configured to enable you to display shipping speeds to customers, it must have at least the following sub-attributes defined [country], [price], [min_handling_time], [max_handling_time], [min_transit_time], and [max_transit_time]

NOTE - If you are also using the [shipping] attribute to indicate the countries that a product is available for sale in, make sure not to remove that information when removing the price information.             
 

The Google Help Center article for the [shipping] attribute is here.

How do I unlink my Simprosys account from Google?

If at any point, you’d like to stop sending your order tracking data to Google, you can unlink your account by doing the following:

1. Sign in to Google Merchant Center here
2. Click the gear icon in the top middle of the screen
3. Click “Linked accounts”
4. Select “Platforms”
5. In the row with Simprosys, click “Unlink”
6. Click affirmatively through any warning messages

Getting help

If you need any help, send an email explaining the issue to support@simprosys.com. Our team will jump to the rescue!