It was great while it lasted. For 10 years we’ve provided a magic button to get your products listed in Google shopping results for free.
Sadly, we won’t be able to submit product feeds to Google on your behalf and the magic button will disappear next month (February 2013), as Google brings in a new paid for version of their shopping service.
Meaning?
We’ll no longer be able to list products in Google Shopping for you. If you want to keep listing your products in Google’s shopping results (recommended) then you’ll need to start paying for your ads to appear.
It’s going to be similar to Adwords (cost per click based). Infact the new Google Shopping ads will become part of the Adwords programme, and will be managed from within the Google Adwords control panel.
Who’s going to handle my product feed?
You. ekmPowershop.com will still generate the product feed (a URL to a file containing all your products’ attributes and details such as price, image, description etc.) in the correct format to make this nice and easy.
The main difference?
You’ll need your own Google Merchant Centre account to add your shop’s product feed to. At the moment all product feeds go into our partner level Merchant Centre account. We’ll keep this account open as long as possible so shop owners can claim their feeds.
When?
As far as we know, the format of Google Shopping will change visually on the 13th February 2013, with some sponsored ads appearing.
Will there still be free listings?
We believe that as part of the initial rollout, there will be a mixture of free and paid for listings. With this in mind it’s definitely worth getting set up so you can enjoy some free listings whilst they last. By the end of Q2 this year the transition over to the paid for platform is set to be fully complete. So there’s a chance that’s when the free listings will disappear forever.
Google Merchant Centre or Google Adwords?
Both! You’ll need a Merchant Centre account where your product feeds will go. Then you’ll need an Adwords account to set up and manage your ads. The 2 need to be linked, which is an easy process covered by Google in this useful video.
Benefits?
Who knows until it’s here… but here are a few theories:
- More control – over what Google Shopping displays about your products and your business, because you create your own ads
- Better quality results
- Better buyer experience
- Better reporting
- Less competition
Drawbacks?
- Cost
- Time
- ‘Another thing’ to manage
HELP! What should I do?
If you want to get your products listed with the new Google Shopping platform and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, do this:
- Create a Google Merchant account and claim your feed* ASAP (*you only need to do this if we’ve been submitting the feed for you)
- Create a Google Adwords account.
- Link Merchant Centre and Adwords together.
- Make sure your feed is fit and healthy (Merchant centre will tell you this) and create some adverts in google Adwords.
- Bid, monitor, refine (like most PPC models)
That’s far too much hassle!
We agree! There’s clearly going to be more work in getting your products into Google Shopping than in the past. It’s brand new so more than anything we think shop owners just need to be shown the ropes with a little help in getting set up.
So we’ve come up with a ‘Google Shopping Starter Pack’ where we’ll set up your feeds, relevant Google accounts and we’ll even get the ball rolling with £75 worth of clicks. Click here for more info.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Ecommerce, Ekm Systems Ltd, ekmPowershop.com News, Top Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 31st, 2013 at 1:17 pm
Hi,
You can get a £75 voucher for PLA’s here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/shoppingcouponuk/
Surely these changes make it more important to have some extra fields ?
I tried to make my PLA more targeted with using field like adwords_grouping and adwords_labels but its sooo much hassel to have to do these manually….
Can we get these please? In the advanced inventory manager? Can’t be that harder update to make?
Thanks
February 6th, 2013 at 7:20 pm
GOOGLE IS BEING GREEDY – IT IS THE SMALL BUSINESS THAT THIS COUNTRY DEPENDS UPON – THESE SMALL BUSINESSES WILL BEGIN TO FAIL VERY QUICKLY AND IN TURN GOOGLE WILL LOOSE THOUSANDS OF REGULAR CUSTOMERS AND THE GOVERNMENT WILL RECEIVE LESS REVENUE.
THE BIG BOYS WITH THE MONEY WILL SURPRESS FREE TRADE.
I WILL NOW SERIOUSLY CONSIDER GIVING UP MY BUSINESS AS THE PROFIT IS VIRTUALLY NON EXISTANT.
February 12th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
This is a shame because it used to be a very good free service, I always used it as a buyer and was planning to use it as a seller too. The problem I can forsee with their new system is that the smaller firms could easily be out-bid by the larger organisations offering similar products.
February 14th, 2013 at 12:48 am
All set up for google shopping, very easy to follow guide, thanks again ekm, very helpful as usual!
Thanks for the link to the £75 voucher Graham
February 22nd, 2013 at 11:23 pm
When does google shopping change take affect !! Will it be cheaper to sell on ebay and amazon ?
February 25th, 2013 at 3:02 pm
I agree with James Lyon and Richard. EKM has been a fantastic service (I have been with you since 2007) but I’m afraid people are going to look elsewhere thanks to the greed of google. Small businesses won’t have funds to pay to stay visual on google. I have tried PPC before and lost a load of money, not worth it for me.
February 26th, 2013 at 9:10 am
The changes started on Feb 13th. So now there’s a mixture of free and paid listings. We’ve spoken with Google direct and they intend to phase out the free listings completely in June.
March 2nd, 2013 at 1:18 pm
As a shopper I used Google shopping all the time. It was very useful and helped me make my online purchases. I just did a search with it in the new format. Got totally unhelpful results–4 cameo necklaces available on Etsy were the extent of my results for a necklace search. I guess Google shopping is ruined now for customers….I won’t bother looking at it anymore.