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Marketing Feeds and Tax/Shipping Rates

When international customers visit your store, the prices are adjusted to their country's currency.

Due to country price coefficient, and/or different VAT policies, the prices your customers see may be different from those shown to customers in other countries with the same currency.

Therefore, the feed platforms in use need to be adjusted to support the price localization.

Domestic feeds

Due to automatic IP redirection, it is recommended that you update your domestic product links to include a country and currency parameter to prevent Google price violations.

To do this, add the Global-e glCountry and glCurrency parameters to the product page URL in your generated feeds.

Example:

https://storefront.domain/nice-shoes?glCountry=US&glCurrency=USD

International feeds

When generating international marketing feeds, ensure you are doing the following:

  • Append the glCountry and glCurrency parameters to the product page URL in the feed's platform.

    Example:  https://storefront.domain/nice-shoes?glCountry=FR&glCurrency=EUR

  • For countries where prices are being calculated by Global-e, the prices in the feed must be retrieved from the Global-e getCatalogPrices API.

Feeds should be re-generated daily to update prices that may have changed due to foreign exchange rate updates.

Shipping rates

To ensure a smooth experience, you'll want to define your shipping rates in the Google Merchant Center (GMC) using the range-based option. These rates should match what you've set up in the Flat Shipping Rates section of your Global-e admin.

Most of our merchants simply copy the shipping rate settings from Global-e into GMC, which helps prevent any mismatches or errors.

If you’re not currently using flat rates, we recommend reaching out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to discuss switching to flat rates for the countries you’re marketing to.

Tax rates (US Shipping Only)

If you're shipping to the United States through Global-e, here are some important notes regarding sales tax settings in GMC.

If you're considering building state-specific tax rates into your product feed, please note that this is not something we currently support directly. You’d need to manage those configurations yourself.

Google requires you to enable sales tax settings based on your tax obligations. If this setting is not enabled, Google will assume a 0% tax rate across the board, which could create mismatches at checkout and trigger warnings in your account.

Here are a few options for how you can manage US tax rates in GMC:

  1. Include tax rates per item in your product feed – This is a more complex setup and may require more ongoing maintenance.

  2. Set a state-level rate in GMC:

    • Choose a specific rate if your products all fall under the same classification.

    • Or use the maximum rate for each state to avoid potential mismatches.

  3. Let Google automatically calculate the tax rate – this is the easiest option, and we’ve seen many brands use it successfully. Google will check that the correct rate is applied when validating your feed.

Please refer to Google’s help page on instructions on how to configure these settings: Set up tax settings (US only) - Google Merchant Center Help.

At Global-e, we use Avalara to calculate sales tax in the US, so all tax rates applied at checkout are based on product classifications and align with state guidelines provided on Avalara’s State Sales Tax Rates page.