Google Shopping Now Allows Free Product Listings

The world, as we all know it, is in chaos right now. Amidst all the tension, certain ecommerce retailers are still managing to bring a smile on the face of their customers by continuing to operate. With the help of multichannel listing tools and multichannel selling software, it’s now an almost perfect time to put up your listings across various online platforms, and employ features such as inventory management, order management, and so on to keep your ecommerce store running.

Of the many positive points to be thankful for, ecommerce retailers can add yet another thing to that list. This is because Google recently announced that the Google Shopping platform will be undergoing a big change, which is that it will now allow business owners (anyone who sells their products online) to list their inventory for free. Product listings on Google weren’t free for ecommerce retailers up until this point, but that’s all about to change. This move was mainly taken keeping the coronavirus pandemic in mind that has led many retailers of the brick-and-mortar stores to close their doors.

Bill Ready, Google’s President of Commerce, said in a blog post

“For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings.” Reddy was also heard saying that, “We think that by doing this, it helps many more shoppers find what they’re looking for, but it also helps bring some quite needed relief to the retail and small business ecosystem.”

Ready also stated that these plans were being worked on for quite a while now, and that they had to be put in an accelerated mode due to the ongoing global crisis. The latest free option for Google Shopping will be made available in the United States from the 27^th of April, and will be available worldwide in the next few months.

How Things Were

It has been almost twenty years since Google Shopping has been an integrated element of the reputed search engine. In all this time, it has come to be regarded as a comfortable alternative to the other popular, standard ecommerce names such as Amazon, and also the more common retailers, namely Walmart and Best Buy, thereby allowing retailers to post the direct website links and allowing customers to search for individuals items and the related price matches.

Since 2012, however, changes were implemented. That’s when Google Shopping made it compulsory for merchants to pay a price for their product listings to go up on Google Shopping. Therefore, as a result of this move, fewer and fewer companies opted to use Google Shopping, and instead turned to utilizing other third-party seller services such eBay and the Amazon Marketplace, and also running the standard Google Search ads.

In fact, the platform of Google Shopping also experienced a €2.4 billion fine from the European Union in 2017. This occurred due to Google giving more importance to Google Shopping links in search results as opposed to the competing price matching services.

How the Scenario Will Change

With Google now allowing free product listings, the scenario is bound to change, especially now at a time when brick-and-mortar stores have either been forced to shut down or shift most things online. As per the Commerce Department, the total US sales dropped by 8.7% in March, including online and offline retail sales and food and beverage spending. According to The New York Times, that counts for the biggest drop in almost three decades since the federal government started tracking the metric.

One reason for this drop is because of the government ordering mandatory closing down of the businesses and physical retail stores. Yet another reason is the inability of certain sellers to move everything online, as certain items and categories continue to be out of stock even for the big names in the business.

According to Bill Ready, this new change won’t bring any major changes related to the shortage of products or the issues associated with supply and demand. However, it will indeed benefit small businesses as they will begin to show up more in search results.

Features of the New Program

Here are the features of this new program that the ecommerce retailers should be noting down:

• The main Google Search page won’t undergo any changes, and the carousels of product listing ads (PLAs) will only contain ads, as per usual. The paid shopping ads will reflect on the top and bottom of the page on the Google Shopping tab, similar to the main search results tab. The future could bring about new layout experiments, just like how Amazon now distributes its sponsored products ads all across its search results pages.

Unites States’ Google Shopping hub, which witnessed a total redesign last autumn, will witness these tweaks as well, particularly on the search results pages. The homepage of the hub, containing curated product themes will continue to have only feature paid listings, at least in the beginning.

• The free listings, much like the ads, will be powered by product data feeds. These are the ones that will be uploaded to the Google Merchant Center . It was a little over a year ago when Google made the Merchant Center available to all retailers in order to enable organic product visibility in different areas of the search results, images included. Organic product listings can also be found under the section of “popular products”.
• A new partnership was announced by Google with PayPal along with the announcement of the free product listings. The partnership entails merchants with PayPal accounts being able to link the said accounts to Google Merchant Center. This will then allow Google to view all the details of the seller in a quicker way and therefore verify the trusted merchants. Google is also known to partner up with ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce in order to make it easier for the ecommerce retailers to manage their inventory as well as their products.

So finally, Froogle Is Back – For Real This Time!