Announcements are rolling in for Google’s new automated product repricer for Buy on Google, a program ecommerce merchants can leverage within Google Merchant Center.

Now, eligible Buy on Google merchants can begin creating automated rules for repricing products they sell on Google Shopping.

This comes just days after Google sent out “final notice” to merchants who have yet to migrate fully to the zero commission model released in fall 2020.

As this new feature is only available specifically for Buy on Google, it has no impact on Free Product Listings or the more traditional Shopping Ads.

When logged into their Google Merchant Center accounts, retailers and/or advertisers can navigate to this new tool within Marketing > Pricing rules:

How It Works

This new feature allows merchants to create rules that will automatically lower the prices of their products on Buy on Google.

When products are enabled for Buy on Google and subsequently appear on Google Shopping, the entire shopping experience occurs on Google with a natively hosted checkout and a slew of other consumer features.

With that, and since interacting with these products does not take consumers to the ecommerce website (as with Shopping Ads), merchants can proactively attract shoppers where it counts most: pricing.

Rules can be created based on two select goal types currently:

• Lowest price – Reprices products based on the lowest sale price of the same products that already live on Buy on Google.
• Cost of goods sold – Reprices products based on COGS, but more specifically the cost_of_goods_sold attribute shipped to Merchant Center via one’s product feed.

Now, before we get into actually creating rules, its important to note that there are new product feed attributes that are available specific to this new feature.

This includes:

• repricing_rule_id: Either Rule type being selected, the next step requires a Rule name, Rule ID, and “higher by” setting which, more specifically, allows you to set a price increase either a set percent or dollar amount above one’s cost of goods sold:

The Rule ID can then be utilized to apply rules only to products with the repricing_rule_id attribute in one’s product feed sent to Merchant Center:

Additionally, as you can see, you can opt to apply rules to all products or create custom filters albeit the filters are a bit limited at this time. You may also choose to not apply repricing rules to products with live promotions.

• auto_pricing_min_price: Sets the Price floor or absolute maximum you will allow Google to lower a product’s price by

Similar to before, you may opt to use this attribute OR specify a maximum percent or whole dollar value for your Price floor:

With all your desired settings applied, you can finish creating a rule and opt to manage its runtime manually or set a start and end date:

Important To Note

Per some “fine print” and Google’s own support docs on this new feature:

• The maximum number of rules you can create is 100. While you can request an increase on this limit, it is best practice to be mindful about how you create rules and group offers.
• If price is negative after applying your rule to the offer, the rule will be invalid and the offer price will remain as is.
• It can take up to 36 hours after creation for repricing rules to take effect and the effects can last for some time even if a rule is paused or removed.

While our team is working towards integrating these new product feed attributes into our Feed Tool offering, eligible Buy on Google merchants can leverage Supplemental Feeds to apply these new attributes to products in their primary feed.

We’re excited to see yet another exciting feature come out for Buy on Google as there has already been tremendous focus on improving Google Merchant Center as a whole even this early into 2021.