Address Filters, more than meets the eye

Posted by Annand Sharma, Google Checkout Team

Do you know about the address-filters tag? If you're using Merchant Calcualtions you must use address-filters to specify restricted and allowed shipping areas. For example, if you set your address-filters to indicate that you only ship to the lower 48 states, and a buyer selects an address in Hawaii, the buyer will see a message indicating the seller does not ship to the location. The address-filters are evaluated before Google Checkout sends the merchant-calculation-callback request to your system- so it can save you server cycles or 3rd party shipping API calls.

You can continue to use the shipping-restrictions tag. But Google Checkout will only look at shipping-restrictions if the merchant-calculation-callback fails for any reason. Here's an XML snippet for a shipping method that ships to all 50 US States under normal circumstances. If the callback fails, however, this method will only ship to the lower 48 states for a price of $8.00


<merchant-calculated-shipping name="Ground Shipping">
  <price currency="USD">8.00</price>
  <address-filters>
    <allowed-areas>
      <us-country-area area="FULL_50_STATES"/>
    </allowed-areas>
  </address-filters>
  <shipping-restrictions>
    <allowed-areas>
      <us-country-area area="CONTINENTAL_48"/>
    </allowed-areas>
  </shipping-restrictions>
</merchant-calculated-shipping>


If you only use shipping-restrictions and Google Checkout receives your merchant-calculations-results, then the shipping-restrictions won't eve be evaluated. If you rely on Google Checkout to decide whether or not you ship to a given address, it is important that you use address-filters.

Click here for a more in depth explanation of use cases for shipping-restrictions and address-filters

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