In a continued effort to make its once low priority shopping platform more and more merchant friendly, Google has slowly been rolling out more features in an effort to keep their product up to date with the big boys.

A few months back we discussed their ability to track click-throughs of products submitted via Google Base, which is generally the one universal feature that all other shopping engines have.

Now they’ve announced that they’ll soon be implementing a tax + shipping variable that merchants can send along with their feed. Since most other major engines already support such header columns, this is fairly significant since tax and especially shipping rates can have a major effect in the overall product price which in turn can strongly influence a consumer’s buying decision.

Their help center answers everything in a rather lengthy and confusing way–but essentially it works in a similar manner to the other engines.

Basically there are two steps for each of the tax and shipping processes:
a) Set a default location which will determine what your tax and shipping rates are
b) (optional) Set individual overriding options for each product if they’re not consistent with your default values.

Adding these features to your feed will prove to be beneficial as it will improve click through rate (free of charge), as merchants who lack this feature will more likely be skipped over, and should improve your overall relevancy with Google Product Search and increase the rankings of your listings.

Google also plans on making a “condition” attribute required in all data feeds in the near future, which can be set to “new”, “used”, or “refurbished”.

For a complete list of required and recommended features be sure to check their help section.

One of the initial choices that a merchant has to make when signing on to an engine is to decide whether or not they want to display their company logo on search results pages, or simply limit it to a text listing (example below).

Having experimented both ways with our merchants, we’ve generally recommended against posting logos on the listings for a few reasons.

Additional cost is too high

Shopping engines will generally charge an additional $0.10 per click for the privlelege of displaying one’s logo next to their product listings–and if the end goal is to reduce one’s cost of sale, the extra dime per click can add up quickly to a merchants overall spend on the engines.

Benefits are marginal

The goal of attaching a logo on a search result page is to improve brand recognition, or to take advantage of one’s already popular brand.

The issues here are, if you already own a popualr brand whose logo is recognized, then the text version is certainly not any less recognizable–and if you’re not quite a household name, we hardly believe a few small images flashing by on search results can help you become one.

Bottom line?

In the end if you are even moderately happy with your investment on the shopping engines, we’d strongly recommend against posting your logo up on your listings as it can dramatically increases your costs with little return.

However if you’re a merchant with overflowing cash reserves–first of all be sure to let us know some of your secrets and we’ll share some of ours –but secondly if you want to see a potential increase in traffic, adding your logo to the engines may be worth experimenting with so long as you keep a close eye on the increase in spend.

Personally I wouldn’t bet on a proportionate increase in your revenue.

-Tien

Wishing you a happy feeding experience

For all you frugal (not to confused with Froogle) shoppers out there: in case the $50,000 Betty Boop slippers weren’t enough of a bargain, perhaps a “kiddie” lamp that can potentially pay off the US national debt can pique your interest:

They manage to somehow be the first result for the broad, generic term of “lamp”, which onlookers may click-away on strictly for curiosity, costing them a good amount of money.

The good news though is that these guys only need to sell one of these to make up for unwanted clicks, and will probably be set for the next few months, or potentially years/lifetimes.