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Google’s Retail Change, From Free To Paid, Is Rightfully Scaring A Lot Of Merchants
Predicting what Google will ultimately do is almost impossible. Yes, it did freely incorporate product listings with its core search function. But that was when both were free, which meant that just about every retailer was involved. When Google changes everything and makes Google Shopping a paid service, will it then stop letting those results impact the main search listings, as Eddie Bauer will seek? And if all retailers insist on that in exchange for paying, will that result in the exact type of credibility taint that Google warned of in its IPO?
Top Google watchers agree the free search listings might indeed end up being impacted, but there’s no way to know for certain. And while Google is trying to sell listings, it has good reasons to be deliberately vague and ambiguous. Google wants retailers to fear that if they don’t pay up, they’ll get frozen out (well, buried under hundreds of listings is more accurate) from the main search engine.
“Will merchants end up with product listings in the Web search or core results from Google’s regular crawling of the Web, which will continue for free? Perhaps. But I think any merchant who is relying on this had better make some new assumptions,” Sullivan said. “I hardly think that Google’s going to roll out a new Google Shopping box, complete with paid inclusion feeds, only to decide that it’s more relevant to also have a lot of product listings appearing from merchants in the Web results, as well. I think it will find a way to ensure that its Web results are reflecting something other than a lot of shopping listings, so as not to be duplicative of the shopping box. Bottom line: Merchants who are getting a lot of free traffic from Google should prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Google has never, ever made this type of major shift to take an entire search engine that had free listings and make them all paid. All bets and assumptions are off.”
Andrew Davis, director of marketing for CPCstrategy, another group that watches Google very closely, expressed similar concerns.
“Product feed impacts Google Shopping; organic results are determined by Google spiders. Even though Google Shopping is small compared to Google organic, Google Shopping was one of the last and largest free traffic portals on the Net and is one of the largest sources of traffic and revenue for a lot of merchants, mostly in the small to midsize range. So the change to a paid engine definitely has huge ramifications for all online retailers, big or small. Does using Adwords give you a better bet at increasing your organic SEO rankings? The answer from Google will always be no. And I think it’s highly probably that they’re telling the truth, though no one can be sure. I know a ton of people who think that using Google’s paid services gives them an edge organically.”
The SEO retail environment is about to get a lot more interesting—and frightening.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
