But there's another sharp corner to avoid: online product ad services (Google Ads, Facebook ads etc), tend to penalize merchants who list different prices depending on where the customer is located[1]:
> Don’t change the price of your product on your landing page based on a user’s location. Ensure that users can purchase the product online for the price that you submit, regardless of their location.
Which means that (if you don't want your Google ads account deactivated) you can't bake in a variable shipping cost into the product cost; you can only select one amortized shipping cost.
So sellers who want to offer free shipping are really between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time in terms of not losing money on shipping vs not overcharging buyers.
Yes, that's true. That can help with international rate discrepancies for ecommerce sites that have those different TLD's. But I know for a fact that there are large ecommerce sites out there that are not doing per-TLD ad syndication, as they probably should.
Also, shipping rates within a single country can still vary pretty dramatically based on distance traveled, whether you're shipping to a remote area postal code, etc.
> Don’t change the price of your product on your landing page based on a user’s location. Ensure that users can purchase the product online for the price that you submit, regardless of their location.
Which means that (if you don't want your Google ads account deactivated) you can't bake in a variable shipping cost into the product cost; you can only select one amortized shipping cost.
So sellers who want to offer free shipping are really between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time in terms of not losing money on shipping vs not overcharging buyers.
[1] https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324371?hl=en&re...