Canada Shipping in Merchant Center: Build Zones by FSA Rather Than by Province

A Merchant Center account built for France or for the United States can set its shipping zones by region or by state. In Canada, that sub-attribute does not exist. This post describes what Google’s help pages accept for Canada, how to read the forward sortation area (FSA) on which everything rests, and a starting split for a store that ships across the country, with Québec as the example. Google’s help pages and the Canada Post page were reopened on October 14, 2026. What we write from our own reading is marked “in our view”.

What the shipping attribute accepts for Canada

The shipping attribute lets you limit a rate or a speed to a zone. Google asks you to define that zone with only one of the four sub-attributes below. Here, from the attribute’s help page, are the countries where each is supported.

Canada is therefore absent from region (the region, state, territory or prefecture depending on the country) and from location_id (the criteria ID from the Google Ads API). It is present for postal_code and for location_group_name, a group you define in the “Regions” settings of Merchant Center.

For Canada, the page tells you to use the forward sortation area identifier without the local delivery unit (Google’s example is M5H), and to express a range of FSAs with a prefix followed by a wildcard (Google’s example is K*).

Shipping costs are required for Shopping ads and free listings in Canada. Google also warns that if no cost is submitted for a region you ship to, the product or the account could be disapproved. A gap in the zones therefore exposes the product or the account to disapproval.

Where provinces come into play in Merchant Center

The “Set up regions” page contains a country table that separates two uses. For Canada, regional availability and pricing (the add-on that lets you vary product availability and price) is listed as “available by state, postal code”, and the page refers to states or provinces at the creation step. For shipping cost and transit times based on custom areas, the table lists only “available by postal code”.

The account-level shipping settings page says the same about costs: destination by state or region is available for eight countries that do not include Canada, while destination by postal code is available for nine countries that include Canada. In our view, a region built with provinces can therefore serve availability and price, but not shipping.

Reading an FSA

Canada Post describes the postal code as six characters in the form ANA NAN, where A is a letter and N a digit. The first three form the FSA, the last three the local delivery unit (LDU), the smallest delivery unit within an FSA. The FSA is what Merchant Center expects.

The first character of the FSA identifies one of 18 major geographic areas, provinces or districts. The second is a digit from 1 to 9 for an urban postal code and the digit 0 for a rural one (A0A as an example). The third, together with the first two, describes a specific part of a city, a town or another area.

The eighteen letters and their areas come from Canada Post. The group labels (Atlantic, Prairies, Pacific, North) are ours.

Québec takes up three letters. In our view, a “Québec” zone is therefore entered with three wildcard prefixes, G*, H* and J*. The Canada Post page speaks of geographic areas and provinces, without saying that every FSA follows the boundary of a province exactly: before publishing different rates for two neighbouring provinces, check the addresses near the border with Canada Post’s postal code lookup tool.

Building the zones, step by step

1. Turn on the “Regions” add-on. In Merchant Center, Settings, Add-ons, Add on the “Regions” card. The target country must be eligible for regional availability and pricing, and Canada appears in the list of countries on the help page.
2. Create the region. Business info, Regions tab, Add region. The ID must be unique for each region and can be alphanumeric, with a minimum of five characters. Add a name and the country.
3. Enter the FSAs, one per line. Google states that it does not accept full alphanumeric postal codes for Canada and Great Britain: only the first three characters are to be provided, otherwise the “Invalid postal code specification” error may appear. An account is limited to 25,000 postal code entries, and a range counts as one entry.
4. Connect the region to a rate. In Products & store, Shipping and returns, Shipping policies tab (up to 20 policies per country), choose the “Destination” rate type, or an advanced cost table that can combine destination with price, weight or number of items (at most 25 rows, 10 columns and 2 dimensions).
5. Set the speed. For transit time, the “Destination by zone” option relies on zones created with postal codes. Manual configuration is limited to 100 zones.
6. Use the feed only as a last resort. Google recommends the account’s shipping settings, presents the shipping attribute as the last resort for overriding them, and also provides for it when costs are not defined in Merchant Center. The attribute accepts at most 100 values per product.

When the attribute is used, its format is the one in Google’s example, shipping(country:postal_code:price), whose US sample value is of the form US:30*:12.75 USD. The format below is derived from it, with an FSA in place of the US postal code. It does not appear as such in the documentation for Canada: test it in a diagnostic upload before extending it to the catalogue.

shipping(country:postal_code:price)
CA:H*:<price> CAD

A starting split for a store that ships across Canada

Rates depend on your carriers, so the table proposes none. It only checks that each of the 18 letters is covered once.

In our view, the North zone is the one to isolate if a carrier charges a different rate. The same reasoning applies to any zone you serve at a different price: separate it, and do not let it overlap the neighbouring zone.

The errors the documentation lets you foresee

1. A full postal code in a region. Google does not accept it for Canada and the “Invalid postal code specification” error may appear.
2. A region sub-attribute in a Canadian offer. The page does not provide for it in Canada. In our view, it is a value to remove rather than to test in production.
3. A carrier rate. Google offers it only for Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. For Canada, what remains includes flat rate, free shipping, price, weight, quantity, destination and the advanced cost table.
4. A coverage gap. An FSA you ship to without a cost submitted exposes the product or the account to disapproval, according to the attribute’s page.
5. Two overlapping zones. For a shipping attribute submitted several times, Google’s best practices advise avoiding conflicting information, for example two different prices for the same region or the same service class. In our view, H* and a specific FSA from the H letter with two prices produce exactly that case.
6. Two sources of truth. Prices and speeds set with the shipping attribute override the account-level settings for the matching zone when the price is provided. In our reading, a rate corrected in the account but left as is in the feed therefore changes nothing for that zone.
7. Taxed shipping costs. For Canada only, Google asks for shipping costs to be submitted exclusive of taxes, which our article on tax-exclusive pricing in Merchant Center covers.

What Google’s pages do not say

• The length of prefixes. The general rule speaks of a prefix followed by a wildcard (example 94*) without fixing its length, and the Canadian example is K*, a single letter. The page does not say explicitly whether a two-character prefix such as H3* is accepted for Canada: try it in the interface before building a rate on it.
• Rural FSAs. The second character 0 identifies a rural FSA at Canada Post. Google’s page describes only a prefix followed by a wildcard. In our view, isolating rural areas therefore means listing the FSAs one by one, or first confirming that a longer prefix is accepted.
• Provincial holidays. The shipping settings page states that Canadian holidays do not count as business days when the estimated delivery date is calculated, and its English version speaks of national holidays. It says nothing about holidays specific to a province.
• States for excluding a zone. The page “What shipping information do I need to provide?” describes a “States” or “Postal codes” destination type for excluding states or territories, without naming countries. We follow the account-level shipping settings page, which limits destination by state or region to eight countries that do not include Canada: confirm it in a Canadian account’s interface before relying on it.

A five-point check

1. Open Shipping and returns, Shipping policies tab, and list the Canadian policies with their rate type. A “carrier” type is a warning sign: it is not offered for this country.
2. Open the Regions tab. Each FSA entry should be three characters at most, with no space and no local delivery unit.
3. Lay Canada Post’s list of letters next to your zones. Each letter appears in one zone, or is excluded knowingly, and none appears twice with two prices.
4. Export the feed and look for the Canadian shipping values. They should contain no region sub-attribute, no full postal code and no taxed cost.
5. In the account diagnostics, open the shipping issues and note the affected products before changing anything.

Our Google Ads in Montréal page describes our work on Canadian Merchant Center and on Law 25 compliance.