List your Products for Free on Google Shopping | TechAffinity

Google will Now Allow any Business to List Products on Google Shopping for Free

It’s been 8 years since Google started charging merchants to list products in its shopping tab. As a part of an evolution to compete against other E-commerce giants and to support struggling merchants to connect with their consumers, Google will now allow anyone to list & sell products for free in its shopping tab. These changes will be implemented before the end of April in the U.S. and globally before the end of this year.

Google’s president of commerce, Bill Ready, wrote 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”

All you Need to Know About Google’s Algorithm Change!

Google’s change to list products for free means the number of free listings will dominate the paid listings in Google shopping’s SERP. Earlier all these listings were sponsored, which means every time someone clicked a listing to buy a product from the merchant’s website, Google charged money from the merchant.

Though this move is expected to reduce Google’s overall advertising revenue, it has to be noted that the decision has been taken to attract more merchants to use the platform.

Distribution of Ads

Though the listing will be made free, Google will still allow people to run shopping ads to rank at the top of free listings. Paid ads will appear at the top as well as the bottom of the shopping tab. This change is also applicable to Google’s shopping hub, which is very popular in the U.S.

How to Get Started?

To get started with this, one has to create an account on the Google Merchant Center, which is free. Follow the below steps to get started with the merchant account.

• You can use your existing Google account or create a new one if you don’t have any.
• Head to Google Merchant Center and start setting up the account.
• Go to “Feeds” under “Products” and create a new Primary Feed (required) and then click the + button. Your feed is nothing but a listing of all the products which you’re going to sell online. You’ll be asked to fill the details like title, description, price, URL, and image URL.
• Once filled, submit your feeds in .txt or .xml format.
• After submitting, you’ve to wait for the next 24 hours for Google to process your request.

Google to Partner with PayPal!

In addition to the above update, Google has also announced a partnership with PayPal. With this, merchants can link their PayPal account to Google Merchant Center, which will help Google to verify the seller details quickly.

With every business struggling to cope up with COVID19 Pandemic, Google’s idea to make product listing free will help merchants to attract a large number of consumers.

TechAffinity’s digital media team is helping a wide array of eCommerce businesses across different verticals to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs). Feel free to shoot your queries to media@techaffinity.com or schedule a meeting to discuss your eCommerce marketing requirements.

Originally published at https://techaffinity.com on April 24, 2020.