So it was announced two days ago (April 21st, 2020) that Google will be rolling out free product sales listings in their Google Shopping section of their massive website. In case you want to jump straight to the source, check out their Official Announcement Blog.
This is in response to the rising need for online commerce solutions as a result of the mass quarantines we’ve all been facing for the past few weeks.
If you currently sell your products online or are planning to soon, keep reading.
When Can I Use This In Canada?
Answer: Before the end of 2020.
Google is planning to roll this feature out in the US and India before the end of April with international releases slated for the rest of 2020. It’s still going to be a few months before we can make use of this here in Canada, but it’s worth keeping on your radar.
What Is Google Shopping?
Similar to Amazon, Google Shopping is meant to be a single destination for resellers. The feature as a whole previously included paid options only to drive traffic to existing ecommerce sites or physical stores, but this free option will make it much more accessible to everyone.
The free option is using the phrasing Show Your Products On Surfaces Across Google and you can follow this link to learn a little more about it.
To paraphrase, they’re referring to anywhere products will show up organically like the Shopping tab in Google.
Is There Anything I Can Do With This Right Now?
1. Use the existing paid features
You can currently use their existing two features, which are Shopping Ads and Local Inventory Ads.
Local Shopping Ads:
These let you advertise your products when someone searches for them on Google before they get to your website. This feature is billed with a pay-per-click model, so you won’t be paying for people who see the ad and choose to ignore it.
Local Inventory Ads:
These ads let you advertise to people who are currently near your physical store searching for your products. You can use this to track foot traffic, in-store sales, and more. Their biggest feature for this type of ads is that your customers can choose to buy online or pickup in your store.
2. Start Setting Up Your Account So You’re The First To Try Out The Free Option.
It’s going to be slightly easier for those that already have an existing merchant account to enable this feature when it comes out, and I imagine you’ll also receive a notification from Google when this feature does release in Canada.
Follow this link to go to the Google Merchant Center and get started.
There’s also a Woocommerce Plugin for Google Shopping already out there for those of you who use Woocommerce with WordPress. Follow this link to see what you need to do to prepare your product data to upload directly into Google Shopping.
That’s all for today!
UPDATE!
December 2020: Google Shopping is now available in Canada.
If you sell products online, you can now sell your products directly on Google. Head over to https://www.google.com/retail/ and get started today.
