Google Shopping or Google Base as it used to be called has been one of our favourite tools for getting traffic and sales for our e-commerce clients for several years now.
Unfortunately last year Google decided that it would be changing this service from being free for merchants to list their products into a commercial model built on the Product Listing Ads program. The new paid program will simply be called Google Shopping. This change has not affected our UK customers for the past few months however Google began rolling out the change to the UK in February with completion estimated for the end of Q2 2013
What this means is that the free traffic merchants have been getting for nearly a decade through what was called Froogle/Google Base will no longer be free, and essentially turn into a paid comparison shopping engine.
Google claims this is building a better shopping experience though we can’t personally see how paid inclusion is better than free, unless you own Google stock. In fact when Google started out it classed paid inclusion as a bad thing and listed it as part of its “Don’t Be Evil” creed however the potential for extra income seems to have made them forget about this.
If you require help converting your existing Merchant Feed into the new pay per click model then please contact us today and we will provide you a quote.
