Google Shopping becomes an important online shopping tool

After many years of developing the product in the US and the UK, Google’s Shopping search tool is likely to become a leading player in the online shopping comparison market and is something that all online retailers should consider as part of their marketing strategy.

Google Shopping is a product and price comparison tool, and one of many sites that offer this service to online consumers. However, the advantage of this service for e-commerce sites is that it’s completely free to list products and the prominence of the service is controlled by Google. Many product related searches now on Google will display a number of featured listings from the Shopping search results, so it’s another way for online retailers to gain search visibility and attract traffic to their website.

Like all the shopping comparison sites, Google Shopping requires online retailers to create an account and submit a product feed to the service, although some retailers are also getting their products listed simply through Google automatically indexing their e-commerce pages. Once listed, items will be listed by relevance – which is based on similar SEO factors that determine the main search results on Google. However, shoppers can also re-sort the results by price as well.

There is no browsable directory structure to Google Shopping, so results will be determined by search query, although Google does display some links in the side panel, which lists related categories, or links to the retailers whose products are being displayed. At present, many of the results are being dominated by eBay listings, but as more retailers submit their product details directly to this service, there will be more variety and competition between the listed results.

As a free service, this is something all e-commerce sites need to consider. The product feed needs to be prepared and updated as necessary to keep the listed information and prices current, but as Google Shopping becomes more commonly found and used by online shoppers, it has to be important channel for retailers to use.

If you’d like more information on, or help with, the new Google Shopping service, please get in touch.

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