Interested in selling on Google Shopping from a BigCommerce store? This is really all you need to know.
What is Google Shopping, exactly? How does it facilitate shopping for buyers?
Google Shopping is a PPC-based ad program for sellers that displays your product listing ads surfaced in a Google search results page (SERP). Google’s SERP has grown more sophisticated in recent years, offering three different sections for product ads to be displayed: in the main listing, in sidebar ads, and in the relatively new Shopping tab.
When Google recognizes the item searched as a product query, the search results page also offers a separate “Shopping” tab at the top, which brings a user to a full page of results for that product from various advertisers, with filtering options to narrow the choices. The Shopping Tab features rich product data like reviews and promotions, and ads can be promoted directly to your market’s target audience. It also functions as a price comparison engine for certain listed products. As you can see here, one brand (SimpliSafe) has dominated the bidding war for this real estate based on the keyword, “home security systems.” (Whether this approach is a good idea will be discussed in a future article.)
As a hybrid shopping channel comprising elements of both product listing ads and shopping comparison engines, Google Shopping ads are close to a must-have these days for any enterprising e-commerce business.
To use Google Shopping from a BigCommerce store, the steps are relatively simple.
Getting Started with Google Shopping on BigCommerce
To sell with Google Shopping ads, you’ll first need to have an account in Google Merchant Center, which is the central “brain” of any commercial activities on Google. If you or your store already have a regular Google account, you can use your current account ID to open the account in Merchant Center.
If you don’t have a regular Google account, start here.
Once you’re past that step, you can start up a Google Merchant Center account.
Then verify and claim your store’s website URL in Merchant Center, so Google will know who is sending over the listings.
PRO TIP: Make sure that the domain you claim in Merchant Center also matches the domain in any product links you will be sending over
If those are different, you will either need to claim a different domain or replace the domain used in the feed.
You also need to sign up for Google Ads before you can send your product data to Google.
Sending your product feed to Merchant Center–the right way.
You will then need to upload your product listings with a product feed. BigCommerce has a direct channel integration with Merchant Center, but think carefully before you go the easy route. There are product feeds, and then there are robust, optimized product feeds. You will want the latter if you want your products to surface high in a filtered search.
Shoppingfeed syncs product listings to Google Merchant Center (and to about 1000 other shopping channels across the globe) in a way that optimizes them for Google search engines. Our robust field mapping feature identifies every possible attribute that can be applied to your products, according to Google’s unique configuration requirements.
Sometimes Google may reject listed items for any number of minor reasons or errors. Another reason to choose Shoppingfeed for feeding your products to Google is our long partnership with Google Shopping. This relationship and our award-winning customer service team can help get all your items approved by Google if any issues arise.
Start advertising your products
Your final step is to create a Shopping campaign in Google Ads to get your ads up and running. As with any other PPC campaign, you can calibrate your bidding and budget for better optimizing campaigns.
Shoppingfeed offers the Google Shopping channel for free to users in the U.S., as a way of introducing e-commerce managers to our multichannel services. It comes with unlimited order importing, one-on-one onboarding, plus email and chat support. Syncing your product feed takes no more than four hours, as does getting help when you need it. You can find the Shoppingfeed extension in the BigCommerce App Store, or go directly to sign up for the free service here.
