Google Product Search Ties up Gloves, Adds New Features

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.