VersaFeed clients wonder: when does it become truly necessary to implement Regional Availability & Pricing (RAAP)?
It's a great question, because some of the RAAP functionality is indeed already baked into normal Google Merchant Center (GMC), and there's even some overlap with Local Inventory Ads (LIA). Let's dive into RAAP and see if we can figure this out!
RAAP's most important words are "availability" and "pricing"—it lets you adjust both based on the product's shipping destination. However, GMC already lets you adjust shipping fees and specify where the product can be shipped. All of these concepts overlap, and confusion often results. Let's start our understanding by first looking at "old school" PLA ads and GMC configuration settings.
Standard GMC and PLAs, with no RAAP, still let you modify your shipping. For instance, as a furniture store, you might specify in GMC that you only deliver to certain zip codes, and you might even increase the costs as you expand away from your store's zip code. Similarly, as a wine merchant, you might simply not specify any shipping settings for states like Utah, which are very restrictive about alcohol being shipped to them. In both cases, you've effectively limited the availability by simply modifying the shipping rules. That works, although it might be considered just slightly hacky (because you've effectively set your "product availability" by adjusting product shipping settings—and availability and shipping ideally are two separate concepts).
It gets harder to make that hack work when you have multiple warehouses. Let's say you expand your furniture business and now have one warehouse in New York and another in Los Angeles. You could still set up shipping rules to manage this like you did above, but those shipping rules generally apply to all products in your GMC account. So you could get fancy and use GMC shipping_labels to only apply your New York shipping rules to products in New York and your LA rules to LA products. This would probably work, but you're not only managing multiple shipping rules—you’re also having to apply the right shipping_labels in your feed to each product based on its warehouse location (in essence, dividing up your products geographically by applying the shipping_label in the feed).
If you add a third warehouse (or stock items in multiple locations), the hack starts to get really ugly. The solution? Stop managing product availability through shipping rules and switch to Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP)! RAAP lets you define regions (by zip codes) in Google Merchant Center (GMC) and name them, like 'NY warehouse zone' or 'LA delivery area.' RAAP typically also requires a new data feed that specifies each product, which region(s) it belongs to, and the quantity and availability at that region. You can see a sample feed below.
To round out this discussion, let’s briefly touch on Local Inventory Ads (LIA). Originally designed to drive in-store visits, LIA has evolved to support localized delivery options as well. However, it falls short when dealing with non-public locations (like warehouses) or complex local delivery rules, such as specific delivery regions, radii, or zip codes. For a deeper dive into how LIA compares to RAAP, see this article.
Hopefully, that helps shed some light on what RAAP is, why it was created, and when to deploy it for your eCommerce store. Need further help? Want VersaFeed to craft a custom RAAP or LIA game plan for your enterprise operations? Contact us today to speak with an onboarding engineer who can provide simple guidance on these complex ad programs.