What’s changing with Google Product Search?

I’ve come across a fair few sellers complaining that Google doesn’t appear to be displaying eBay listings and that product feeds are broken. There appear to be a number of reasons for this – Shop Inventory Format listings no longer exist, eBay feeds appear broken and also Google are now insisting on item condition being included in Google Base feeds.

There could be even more changes around the corner though – Google are beta testing what’s known as the “Product Plus Box”, which is linked to AdWords.

The Product Plus Box is a limited trial in the US and recently expanded to include a few select UK merchants.

At the same time as the Plus Box experiments, some retailers have reported a drop in traffic from Google Product Search of as much as 60-80% in June. If your business relies on Google to send you traffic, whether that be to your eBay listings or especially to your own website you need to be aware of the changes taking place.

ChannelAdvisor are holding an online seminar at 7pm on the 23rd July which will look at what is going on with Google Product Search, reports on some Google ecommerce-related tests you may not know about, and finally give online retailers 10 “ready to implement” strategies to help you counteract the steep decline in traffic and sales from Google Product Search.

Regards,
The Cawston Computing Social Networking Team.
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