The new, rapidly expanding Google Shopping marketplace is presenting a world of opportunities for smart merchants who become early adopters and follow all the rules. Just in time for the holiday shopping season, the company has provided some specific best practices for listing and selling your products.
Feeds and data best practices
1. Add your full catalogue to maximize demand discoverability.
- Fix Errors & policy violations to expand your assortment.
- Identify which PLA products are not currently live on Shopping.
2. Fill in robust data to create rich product description pages.
3. Specify availability limits for purchases to avoid the risk of showing an item out of stock.
4. If you’re selling apparel, add variants in your data feed.
Why rich product data matters to shoppers (and therefore why it should matter to you)
40%
of consumers returned online purchases because of poor product content.
66%
of shoppers abandoned a sale due to limited product information.
86%
of shoppers are unlikely to make a repeat purchase with a retailer that provided inaccurate product information.
What does Google mean by a “rich product data page?”
The best way to describe it is with an example:
How to create rich product data pages
If you are a Manufacturer:
Add product data to your Manufacturer Center Feeds. As a manufacturer, Google trusts the data you share and uses this information to help shoppers find and understand your products and to enrich the PDPs.
If you’re a Merchant, but not a manufacturer or brand owner:
Submit all your product data attributes to your Merchant Center Feeds. All merchants can also leverage Google Product Ratings. If you participate in the Product Ratings program, you can share review data using their Product Ratings Feed.
For an even deeper dive into optimizing your PDPs, see these useful tips from Google,
Retailer quality and servicing standards count big time.
Retailer standards
These are benchmarks that help to measure your performance success and identify areas for improvement. Every month, Google reviews how well you are meeting their customer service standards.
Other best practices:
- Regularly review your item feedback and availability
- Provide Tracking ID’s to the customers as you ship
- Ship items on time
- Accurately calculate transit times
Return Management
Google-facilitated returns are required for Shopping Actions retailers, because Google wants to provide a consistent and reliable customer experience.
Returns Best Practices
Make sure to process and refund returned items on time (within 2 business days).
Consider a seasonal override for your return policy.
Google recommends that all items purchased between November 1 and December 25 should be returnable until January 24 for a full refund.
Google has also added a new user interface in the Merchant Center for processing and tracking product returns. Go to Merchant Center > Orders > All Returns.
See more about best practices in Google’s Merchant Center Help area.
Drive Holiday sales through promotions.
Promotional banners display on your merchant storefront, product listing pages, and Product detail pages.
You can also highlight unique offers to help you win the Buy Box competition:
And finally, here’s a handy planner for the 2019 holiday sales season.
As a Google Partner, Shoppingfeed can help ensure all of your product listings on Google are perfectly entered and fully optimized. We sync and refine your inventory data, and ease fulfillment with automated workflows that fully conform with Google’s quality standards for retailers.
