Google Shopping at Christmas. Getting delivery times and availability right in your feed

What do you change in Merchant Center for December?

Four settings: raise the handling time to the value you really need at peak, move the cutoff earlier to your real time in the German time zone, and set the business days explicitly for handling and transit. Fourth, on the day after your carrier's deadline, set the handling time high enough that no delivery date before Christmas appears that you can't keep.

Handling time is too low almost everywhere in the Christmas season. If you pack in four hours in June, you need a day in the second week of December and two in the third. Set max_handling_time to the realistic peak value, because Google calculates with the maximum anyway, and a value that's too low produces promises the customer experiences as a delay. After Christmas, you set it back.

The order cutoff belongs in the feed per shipping option, as sub-attributes of shipping: handling_cutoff_time in HHMM format and handling_cutoff_timezone as Europe/Berlin. Without a time zone, Google uses the time zone of the delivery destination, which happens to fit in Germany, and for shipping to Austria, Switzerland and most EU countries too, but not for the UK, Portugal, Greece or Finland. Per product, there's also the standalone handling_cutoff_time attribute with the sub-attributes cutoff_time and cutoff_timezone, but the values inside shipping take precedence over it. What the standalone attribute can't do: override account settings. If you only maintain shipping in the account, set the cutoff in the Merchant Center shipping settings instead. If you need different times for individual products, add them as sub-attributes inside shipping, where they then take precedence over the account. Google describes the details in the help page on order cutoff time.

You set the business days with shipping_handling_business_days for handling and shipping_transit_business_days for transit, each as a list or range, such as M-F for Monday to Friday or M-S if your carrier delivers on Saturdays. That settles the Saturday contradiction in Google's default for your account. Important: both attributes only know weekdays, not calendar dates. You can't exclude December 24 this way, which leaves the handling time.

Hence the fourth step: on the day after the carrier's deadline, for DHL that's December 23, set max_handling_time to at least one day, or two if your transit time is only one day. The reasoning: an order placed on the 23rd with one day of handling ships on the 24th at the earliest, which Google counts as a business day. After that, the 25th and 26th drop out as holidays and the 27th as a Sunday, so the first transit day is December 28, and that's then also the earliest date Google gives. If the handling time stays at zero, on the other hand, Google still promises the 24th for orders placed on the 23rd with one day of transit, even though your carrier no longer picks up the parcel. It's less elegant than a switch, but it's the way that's documented to work.

Also worth doing: in Merchant Center under return policies, create a seasonal return policy that takes gifts back until mid-January. Google can show the return policy in the ad, and in December a long return window is a reason to buy for many people giving gifts. Also check the shipping costs against the checkout, because express surcharges the shop introduces in December often aren't in Merchant Center and lead to disapprovals for mismatches. How the shipping settings in the account are structured overall is covered in the Merchant Center practical guide.

As a schedule for your calendar, with the DHL dates as an example:

What happens after the last delivery day?

After December 22, the Christmas season in Google Shopping carries on, just with different buyers: anyone ordering now knows it will arrive after the holidays and buys vouchers, gifts for themselves or whatever was missing under the tree. Switching off campaigns is the most expensive mistake of that week, because every pause sends the bid automation back into the learning phase and the business between Christmas and New Year starts without data.

What makes sense in these days, in the order in which we adjust shop accounts.

1. Make the delivery date on Google honest, as described above, so that no buyer sees a promise on December 23 that turns into a disappointment on the 27th.
2. Bring digital vouchers into play as a product group of their own, because they're the only product that still arrives on time at 2 p.m. on December 24.
3. Shift the budget between product groups, away from typical gift items towards what people buy for themselves after Christmas, and don't reflexively lower the bids there, because click prices usually fall in the last week of December while people keep buying.
4. And if you have click and collect or a physical store, show it now through local product listings, because “pick up today” is the last real delivery promise before the holidays.

All of these are decisions at product group level, and you don't make them sitting in the account at 5 p.m. on December 23. With Shopping campaigns where you decide what runs, you decide in advance which groups keep running after the deadline and which get throttled. And if you'd rather not keep track of it yourself, hand it over: Ginny is our AI agent for Google Ads for e-commerce shops in Germany. Every day she checks which products get impressions, which campaign is hitting its budget cap and which products Merchant Center is currently disapproving, and suggests the change to you. Nothing is applied until you approve it, December 23 included.

Sold out or restocking only after Christmas: what goes in the feed?

A product you can no longer deliver gets out_of_stock. A product that's temporarily sold out and that you'll deliver again after Christmas gets backorder with an availability_date. preorder is reserved for products that aren't on the market yet, so it doesn't belong in the feed for restocks.

The availability_date is required for backorder and preorder and is given with date, time and time zone, such as 2027-01-08T09:00+0100. The same date has to appear legibly on the product page. According to Google's availability rules, an estimate such as “January 2027” is enough there if no exact date is possible. In December, backorder is often the better choice than out_of_stock: the product stays visible, the customer sees an honest date, and you don't lose the order to the competitor who still has stock.

What goes wrong most often in December is a mismatch between feed and product page. Google crawls the page and compares, and if the feed reports in_stock while the page shows “sold out”, the product is no longer shown. According to Google, too many such mismatches can lead to account suspension, and the review after a fix takes up to twelve hours, which you don't have in the week before Christmas. Automatic updates in Merchant Center, which Google now calls automations, catch some of this, because Google then takes price and availability from the structured data on the page. They can't replace the feed, though, because they only kick in once Google has recrawled the page, and that can take hours to days. Leave them on, but don't rely on them. How to find and fix disapprovals is covered in Products disapproved in Merchant Center, and if you'd rather not check that yourself every day, let Ginny handle it.

What to do about a holiday shutdown between Christmas and New Year?

Don't set products to out_of_stock for a holiday shutdown, because that contradicts your product page and risks disapprovals. For this, Google provides the pause attribute, which takes a product out of ads for up to 14 days, and excluded_destination for longer breaks.

pause has two values: ads pauses the product in Shopping ads, display ads and local inventory ads, all also in the free product listings, which Google removed from the regular search results in the EEA in September. After 14 days it's over: products paused with all are then archived automatically, and reactivating them can take a day or more. For a shutdown from December 23 to January 6, that's just enough. For anything longer, use excluded_destination with the value Shopping_ads. Google explicitly advises against deleting products, because bringing them back later takes a long time and the history is lost. The details are in the help page on the pause attribute.

There is, however, a third option, which we usually recommend: keep the ads running and only raise the handling time for the duration of the break. If you won't ship from December 23 to January 6, set max_handling_time to ten business days and keep the ads running. Google then shows an honest delivery date in mid-January, the customer decides for themselves, and the campaigns keep their data. People keep buying between Christmas and New Year, vouchers get redeemed and gifts get topped up, and if you pause, you hand all that to the competitors who don't.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Google Help: Estimated delivery time, Handling business days, Order cutoff time, Availability, pause attribute, Availability mismatch, Automations
• Carriers: DHL Business Christmas, in German, GLS Germany, press release of October 6, 2026, in German, DPD, operating hours Christmas and New Year 2026/27, PDF in German, Hermes, shipping deadlines 2025, in German, DPD, delivery times at Christmas 2025
• Law: Section 475 BGB on dejure.org, in German