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Google Product Search announced last Friday (2/24) that accounts that do not have tax and shipping setup may have their items fail and no longer be listed in shopping search results.

We previously posted about Google Merchant Center accounts having warnings displayed for any feeds that did not have this information, now it appears that items will start being considered “errors” and removed.

We strongly recommend you log into your Google Product Search account immediately and setup these rules if you have not done so already.

A few common questions:

1. What if I don’t charge sales tax? You can setup your Google Merchant Center account at the global level to not display any tax calculations, and/or set the tax value as 0 in your feed(s).
2. What if I offer Free Shipping on some items, but charge for others? You can setup a combination of rules in your account and feed to replicate your website’s shipping rules.  Remember your account-level shipping rules are global and take effect when there are no item-level rules or values in your data feed. Item level shipping values override any account level rules for shipping and tax as well.
3. Why aren’t my tax estimates showing in search results? In order for tax to be displayed, you must also have your shipping rules and values setup in your Google Merchant Center account.
4. Why aren’t shipping costs showing using my carrier based calculations in search results? Remember that you must provide shipping weight values in your data feed for this to work.

If you have not already setup your Google Merchant Center account for tax and shipping, you should take time to do this as soon as possible. Google Merchant Center recently started sending out warnings to accounts that were not setup to display tax and shipping. At some point in the near future you will begin receiving errors if you do not have these items configured and your products will not be shown.

You can configure Tax settings in your Merchant Center account, configuring which localities you charge sales tax in and at what rate.

Setting up Shipping can be more involved, but you can setup basic shipping rules within your Merchant Center account to act as a global or default shipping rule. Merchants can setup shipping rules based on the following:

1. Flat Rate – Set the flat rate shipping price for all your products
2. Custom Table – You can setup tables based on price, weight, or number of items.
3. Carrier Calculated – Select your most used or default carrier, adjust any rates (mark up or discount by $ or %) and then define any exceptions to this weight based calculation.

You can always override your global account shipping rules by providing item level details in your data feed.

Check out some older posts about Google Product Search tax and shipping.

As many of you may know, last week Google Product Search started requiring additional unique identifiers such as UPC, MPN, and Brand for all products except Apparel and custom made goods. Books must supply ISBN as well.

Your feed will still be accepted by Google Product Search if you don’t supply these unique identifiers, however, your items may not show up in the search results without them.

We’ve heard from many retailers about the requirement of UPC, some have said it’s unfair or too difficult to obtain this data. In some cases, no UPC or MPN data exists at all for certain types of products.  Google will allow merchants to fill out an exemption request form, and evaluate unique identifiers can be omitted. In most cases where UPC or MPNs are readily available and already provided by other retailers, a merchant’s exemption request will be denied.

Tip 1 – DO NOT make up UPC or MPN data

Tip 2 – Use a UPC look up tool to find values for your products

Tip 3 – Ask your supplier or distributor if they have this data available.

Every retailer is looking for a way to get their Google Shopping results to stand out.  If you’re using other Google products such as Google AdWords or Google Checkout, then you’re familiar with the special Google Checkout badge that you can get to show up on your AdWords ads by linking your accounts. The same thing can be done with your Google Merchant Center account and your Google Checkout account. By linking your two accounts you can get your shopping results to display a Google Checkout badge, the blue shopping cart, and be included in the Google Checkout filter.  Learn more about promoting your store’s Google Checkout payment method this holiday season.

For some retailers, they only sell one type of product and it’s easy to categorize all their products for the shopping engines. For others however this can be an overwhelming task, especially if you have many products in a multitude of categories.

Proper product categorization is a critical foundation to a feed’s success on the shopping engines.  Check out this earlier post on data feed categorization for details.

Many CSEs have promo messaging fields to use things like FREE SHIPPING or GIFT WITH PURCHASE.  Be sure you are using a compatible promo message for each engine, as not all the messages can be used to every shopping engine.  Be careful when including promotional text in your product titles and descriptions themselves, as this violates the policies of engines like Google and your listings can be flagged for removal.

Many of the shopping engines have rather minimal requirements for images in your data feed. Use images of at least 300×300 pixels and dont use generic images or image place holders. Also be aware that a few of the CSE’s don’t allow watermarks on images either.  If you don’t have an image don’t make something up, or use a “no image available” image.

Here’s a link to an older post which has more details and suggestions.

Similar to your links breaking or listings coming down, verify that all your product bids are set. Any bids at the category or product level that are at a) zero, or b) below the min CPC will prevent your products from showing up. Many shopping engines also won’t list your new products unless a bid has been set on the category.

Do yourself a favor and login at least once this holiday season to verify. Also note that many of the CSE’s  raise the category bid for the holidays. You can check out a post over at SingleFeed about 2010 rate increases.

We recommend that you install the ROI conversion trackers for as many of the CSE’s you can. These benefit your relevancy for CSEs that use conversion information in their ranking algorithms. Don’t be concerned about them slowing your site down, just place them at the bottom of the conversion page in the code. That way if one ever hangs up, at least the whole page has loaded and the shopper won’t likely notice a single tracking pixel not loading.

We’ve posted on this in the past-  Nextag, Shopping.com, Become.com and Shopzilla are a few engines that have these ROI trackers available.

There is hardly anything worse than your website being down during the holidays.  Something that I’ve seen and experienced personally when it comes to using the CSE’s is when the urls are broken and the shopper clicks never make it to your website. Maybe it was a url tracking tag that broke, or your feed file somehow had improper urls, whatever the case you don’t want to have this happen to you especially during the holidays. You lose the clicks/visits and you spend click fees.

1. Check out this previous post on how to see if your products are live on Google Shopping.
2. Check Analytics click traffic daily by using url parameters or tags.
3. Setup Google Analytics alerts as explained in a previous post.
4. Run a small test and spot check product listings by clicking on them (this will cost you $ so click wisely).