How Google Shopping sellers and offers work

A Google Shopping product page groups many offers for one product. Each offer comes from a seller and has its own item price, shipping charge, delivery promise, stock status and returns policy. If you collect this data for price monitoring or research, you need to know which of those numbers to compare, what each one means, and why the list looks different from one country, or one day, to the next.

This post walks through the seller list field by field, using a real response from the CrawlerData Google Shopping Sellers API received on 12 October 2026: a pair of wireless headphones in the US with 22 sellers. It only describes fields the API actually returns.

Products, offers and sellers

Three things are easy to blur together:

• The product is Google’s product page, identified by a product_id. One product page can have many sellers.
• An offer is one seller’s listing for that product: their price, shipping, delivery and returns.
• A seller (merchant in the response) is the shop behind the offer. Marketplace sellers usually appear with the marketplace in the name, such as eBay - firesale-deals or Newegg.com - Sybershop.

A Google Shopping search result shows one offer for a product: the price and merchant on the result card. That is not necessarily the cheapest one. To see every offer, you request the product’s seller list with its product_id.

What one seller looks like

Here is one entry from our response:

{
  "position": 7,
  "merchant": "eBay",
  "merchant_rating": null,
  "offer_title": "Sony Wh-1000xm5 Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones (b-stock) - Black",
  "price": { "value": 215, "currency": "USD", "raw": "215.00 USD" },
  "shipping": { "value": 20, "currency": "USD", "raw": "20.00 USD" },
  "total_price": { "value": 235, "currency": "USD", "raw": "235.00 USD" },
  "delivery": "Delivery by October 20 $6.57",
  "availability": "In Stock",
  "returns": null,
  "link": null
}

And what each field means:

Money fields are objects with a numeric value, a currency code and a raw string. The response also carries sellers_count and a product object with the title, brand, description, rating, images, specs and a price_range.

position is worth a note. It is the order after sorting by total price, not the order Google displayed the offers in. If you want “who is cheapest for the shopper”, position 1 is it.

Base price vs total price

The base price (price) is what the seller advertises for the item. The total price (total_price) adds the shipping figure Google shows for the offer. In our example the two lists rank sellers differently:

• Item prices ran from $198.00 to $399.99. That is the product’s price_range, which is based on price, not on totals.
• Totals ran from $198.00 to $415.99, because three sellers charged shipping: $20, $16 and $100.
• One seller’s item price was $199.99, close to the cheapest, but with $100 shipping its total was $299.99, putting it 13th.

Which one to compare depends on the question:

• What will a shopper pay? Use total_price. That is also what the list is sorted by.
• What is the seller advertising? Use price. This is usually what pricing rules and MAP policies refer to.
• Is shipping a competitive lever? Store both and compare the difference.

When shipping is missing

shipping is null when Google shows no shipping figure for the offer. Two of our 22 sellers had none. In that case total_price equals price. That does not mean shipping is free: it means no figure was shown. If free shipping matters to your analysis, treat null and 0 as different values.

Shipping vs the delivery text

delivery is Google’s text for the offer, such as Free delivery by October 20, and it often includes a price. You get it as Google shows it, next to the numeric shipping field, so you can keep both. For the eBay offer above, shipping is $20 while the delivery text mentions $6.57: where the shipping amount decides something, check both before you act.

Tax

Prices are what Google Shopping shows in the country you request, and display conventions differ: in the US, sales tax is usually added at checkout, while in the EU and UK consumer prices generally include VAT. Compare prices within one country, and do not assume a US total is what a shopper pays at checkout.

Condition: new, used, refurbished

Condition information shows up in two places:

• In offer_title. Our eBay offer says (b-stock) in its title, in a list of otherwise new items.
• As a separate product. Used or refurbished items are often listed on Google Shopping under a different product, with a different product_id and its own sellers.

If condition matters, filter on offer_title keywords such as “refurbished”, “renewed”, “used”, “open box” or “b-stock”.

Why seller counts vary by country

Every request is made for one country: you pass a two-letter country code (31 are supported), and the result reflects that country’s Google Shopping. Seller lists differ between countries for ordinary reasons:

• Sellers choose where they sell. A US retailer that does not sell to Germany is generally not listed on the German product page.
• Prices come in local currency. USD for us, EUR for de, GBP for gb, and so on.
• The same ID may not carry over. An ID you found in one country’s results may show other sellers, or none, in another. Look up IDs in each country you plan to check.

Why seller counts change over time

Even in one country, the list is a snapshot. Sellers go in and out of stock, change prices, and appear or disappear from the product page. Two checks a few hours apart can return a different sellers_count without any one seller doing anything unusual. For monitoring:

• Store each check with its timestamp; the job’s completedAt is a good one.
• Treat a seller missing once as a prompt to look, not as a fact.
• Compare like with like: same product, same country, similar time of day if it matters to you.

Getting the seller list

One request returns the whole list, with no pagination or follow-up calls. It costs 1 credit per 10 sellers returned, rounded up, with a minimum of 1, so this product with 22 sellers costs 3 credits:

{
  "endpoint": "google-shopping-product",
  "params": { "product_id": "11726664398501807381", "country": "us" },
  "queue": "live"
}

It loads the full product page and collects every seller on it. For batches, use the fast or regular queue with polling or a webhook (postbackUrl), at the same price as live. Failed jobs are not charged, while a completed job for an ID Google no longer recognises returns "error": "Product not found" with no sellers and costs the 1-credit minimum.

For how this data is used in practice, see competitor price monitoring and MAP monitoring. The Google Shopping API page covers the search results you get product IDs from, and the pricing page lists the credit packs.