The online merchants have got great news from Google’s end this year. Businesses will soon be able to list their products in the Google Shopping tab in the search results at absolutely free of cost. So, keep Google Shopping to your toolkit to sell your products.
This is the first time Google Shopping is giving you similar benefits as you get from organic search results and that is “free”.
This change will be applied in the US search results by the end of this month, and then it will be expanded globally by the end of the year, as per Google.
The roll out is going to start by this week, and in the beginning, the Google Shopping tab will primarily consist of free product listings.
To explain the reason behind making this big decision, Google describes that paying for Google Shopping listing is a bit challenging for the struggling business in this current situation.
“And as consumers increasingly shop online, they’re searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.”
This is definitely a never-before move by Google till date. Google made this decision by keeping merchants’ and consumers’ profits in mind in the current scenario when digital media has become the lifeline for everyone. According to Google –
“With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship, but are less discoverable online.”
How does it benefit retailers, shoppers, and advertisers?
- Retailers:
Retailers get free exposure to millions of people who search for products similar to theirs every day on Google. - Shoppers:
Shoppers get access to more stores and more products to fulfill their requirements. - Advertisers:
Advertisers can not augment their paid campaigns with free listing. - Google has specifically stated that Google Shopping will work primarily for free listings.
- Since it is still accepting the paid listing, the paid merchants will get the top positions on the Google Shopping tab.
- Paid listings will appear with the product listing ad carousel in the Google Search Result.
- The paid shopping ads will also be shown outside of the Google Shopping tab, like the recent addition of shopping ads in Gmail.
The existing users of Merchant Center and Shopping Ads don’t need to do anything extra to avail benefits of free listing.
For the retailers who are new to Merchant Center, Google Says it will start to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.
If you are an existing merchant, you would certainly have a Merchant Center account. For the new merchants, creating a Merchant Center account is a must to publish free product listing. This is because all listings in Google Shopping are based on product feeds uploaded to Merchant Center.
Since the free listing is going to roll out this week, all retailers should set up a Merchant Center account as soon as possible.
The New Partnership with PayPal:
Along with this monumental change to Google Shopping, Google has partnered with PayPal. Merchants can now link their PayPal accounts to Google Shopping to speed up the onboarding process.
With the new partnership launched, PayPal is now a part of Google, just like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.
A few facts to know:
That means, there are still benefits to pay for Shopping Ads advertising. However, if you want to save money on advertising, you can consider this golden chance by Google.