Collecting and maintaining user reviews and ratings is an important activity to participate in as a merchant. Let’s face it, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of merchants out there selling the same or similar products as yours. Why should they by from your store (aside from price)? Give them the confidence to buy from your store by collecting post-checkout reviews which are displayed in the search results on the comparison shopping engines.  Google Product Search does not have it’s own survey, but instead collects merchant ratings from a number of other comparison shopping engines, as well as Google Checkout. If you want merchant reviews on Google but aren’t offering Google Checkout as a payment option, you’ll need to institute the survey scripts from the other CSE’s.

Install 1 post-checkout review script:

Some merchants may only be using 1 shopping engine, or  only able to install 1 pop-up script. Install whatever review survey you can.  I recommend the Bizrate/Shopzilla one, as its reviews are collected and used on Google Product Search.

Install multiple post-checkout review scripts: If you have multiple scripts there are a few ways to go about handling the serving of these surveys.

1. Serve all scripts to pop-up (not advised)
2. Rrotate each script to take turns and pop-up (best approach)
3. Serve the script based on the last clicked source and pop-up (most complex approach).

Here’s a SingleFeed Support article about ROI trackers and Survey Tools.

Setting up Tax and Shipping – Looking to improve your conversion rates on the clicks that come from the shopping engines? Chances are you may not have ever setup tax and shipping rules for your comparison engine accounts when you opened them.  For some advanced merchants, you’ll want to control the tax and/or shipping costs in the data feed itself, but for less sophisticated merchants you can setup shipping rules from each CSE account interface in just a few minutes.  It’s important to set these values in your comparison engine accounts like Google Product Search, Nextag, Shopzilla, and Become.com. Each shopping engine should have a section in the account interface to setup or edit these settings.

Shipping Prices

1. Based of Product Price – If you use a simple shipping table with shipping cost based off the price of the product/order, then follow the steps to replicate that shipping table in your shopping engine accounts. It should only take you 2 minutes per shopping engines.
2. Based of Weight and Zip Code – Retailers who rely on carrier (UPS, USPS, FedEx) calculated rates based on weight and destination zip code will use this method. You will need to provide shipping weight in the data feed so the shopping engine can lookup the rates and estimate them for the shopper. This shipping cost is an estimate, it will likely be slightly off from the calculation on your website especially if you have discount UPS rates, or they add something else to their cart to increase the weight of the order.
3. Free or Flat Rate – If you ship all products at a flat rate (or free) then specify the shipping amount.

Note that if you have more than one of these methods offered you may have to provide shipping values in your data feed.

Tax

1. No Sales Tax – In some cases, you may not charge sales tax.
2. By State or Zip – You can specify the tax rates on most CSE’s by State and some offer tax rates by zip code.
3. Tax on Shipping – Some merchants also charge tax on shipping so be sure to set that up if available or applicable.

Have you wondered how to make your Google AdWords ads more prominent and improve performance? It’s time to hook up your Google AdWords and Google Shopping accounts.

Join SingleFeed and The Rimm-Kaufman Group to hear how to make the most of your Google Shopping and Google AdWords accounts. Learn about AdWords Extension/Plus Box ads, improving your data feed quality and customizing ads to improve click through and conversion rates.

In this webinar we will cover:

- Connecting your Merchant Center & AdWords accounts
- Creating AdWords Extension/Plus Box ads
- Optimizing & tracking your Extension/Plus Box ads

Title: Connecting Google Merchant Center with Google AdWords
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PDT

Register Now

SingleFeed is a Google Merchant Center Partner and leading provider of data feed management and optimization services for small and medium sized merchants ranging from $250K-$20M in annual revenue.

The Rimm-Kaufman Group provides full-service paid search marketing & attribution management services. RKG clients range from startups to the Fortune-500 and include both marketers in retail, travel and finance.

Join SingleFeed next Wednesday for an informational Webinar in which we’ll walk through all the ways your Google Merchant Center feed can be used. It starts with listing products on Google Product Search, but you can also leverage your data feed on the Google Affiliate Network and Google AdWords. It’s time to put the power of your data feed to greater use. Get a jump start on your competition today!

All serious ecommerce businesses with revenue over $500K can benefit from this informative Webinar. Register today if you want to improve your performance, drive more sales, and discover how to better leverage your Google Merchant Center feed.

Brian Smith and Ryan Douglas of SingleFeed will cover:
- Google Product Search and Google OneBox listings
- Google Merchant Center Account Optimization Tips
- Google Product Extension Ads w/ Google AdWords
- Google Product Ads w/Google Affiliate Network

Register now.

SingleFeed is a Google Merchant Center Partner and leading provider of data feed management and optimization services for small and medium sized merchants.

*This webinar will be recorded. If you cannot attend live, please register and a link to the recording will be emailed to you after the event.

SingleFeed is alpha testing an application on Facebook that will allow you to list your top selling products on your Facebook Fan Page. Takes less than 5mins to get up and running. All you need is a Google Merchant Center data feed and a Facebook Fan page.

If you’re interested in testing out the application (it’s free, by the way!), just send me an email: ‘brian at singlefeed.com’

Thanks! -brian

Next Tuesday SingleFeed is running a Webinar on Shopping Engine Success. Register now. We’ll cover 5 straightforward tactics to improve your results on the shopping engines. Whether you’re listing on Google Merchant Center, Shopzilla, or NexTag, this Webinar will give you the tools you need to succeed.

Join us next Tuesday for Top 5 Tactics for Shopping Engine Success

This is one of the quickest account settings to implement which has a significant impact. Shoppers are looking on comparison shopping engines for the lowest prices, why wouldn’t you make your tax and shipping cost transparent? Waiting to provide tax and shipping until they reach your site, or worse the checkout process can hinder your performance from the CSE’s. If you don’t provide it, another retailer will and likely get the click AND conversion. Provide as much information to the shopper further up the sales funnel/process. Merchants who don’t provide tax and shipping info often see higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates from the shopping engines. The goal here is to eliminate any FUDDs as early as possible.

1) You’ll want to login to your Google Merchant Center account and visit Settings > Tax and Shipping.

2) Next you will enter Tax information. Most merchants will charge tax to orders that ship to their home state. Below are the 3 steps to follow.

3) Create a new shipping method under the area Shipping Settings. You will need select which option is best suited for your items. Note that you can only set 1 shipping method within your Google Merchant Center account. If you have a sophisticated shipping program, you should try to include shipping weight AND shipping cost values in your data feed. Tax and Shipping values set in the feed override the global settings at the account level.

Select “Flat Rate” if you ship everything for the same flat rate or for free.

Select “Custom Table” if you ship based on tiers or tables for weight, price, or number of items. For example- some merchants charge rates of $5 for orders of $0-50 and $10 for orders of $51-99 and $0 for orders $100 and up. Other merchants charge $12 for the first item and $6 for the second, third or fourth. Another example could be based on a weight table.

Select “Carrier-Calculated” if you ship using UPS, Fedex, or USPS rates which are estimated by ship from zip code and the shoppers ship to zip code. These estimates may not be 100% accurate, but they provide the shopper a very good idea of the shipping costs, with no major surprises.

If you have questions that aren’t covered in this post, check out Google Merchant Center’s help article, or comment below and ask us!

So spend 10 minutes setting this up to ensure your account ready for success!

Let’s face it, the word “taxonomy” sounds boring. Couple that word with data feeds and you have a whole new level of ennui. If you are submitting a really good feed to a comparison shopping engine, you’re probably including the “category” values. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here -Why Categorization Matters. Most of the shopping engines require you to provide category values so that the engine understands where you want your products to show up or be classified under.

Merchants often times get lazy and improperly categorize, or worse, don’t provide any category values in their shopping engine data feeds. This hurts them more than they realize; their products show up in unintended departments on the engines, and may get curiosityclicks when displayed there which don’t help your performance. I know it can be tedious and time consuming to categorize every individual product for multiple shopping engines, but it must be done.

There’s a unique taxonomy for Pricegrabber, Nextag, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla and the others. Google Product Search even has a taxonomy called product_type (that is optional but strongly recommended).

Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts on data feed categorization using shopping engine taxonomies:

1. Don’t copy and paste or fill the same category value for all your products. Chances are you have products that are in different categories.
2. Don’t use your store’s categories as they won’t match the shopping engine categories.
3. Don’t leave category/taxonomy values in a feed blank. Your feed will be rejected from the engine, or your items will show in all the wrong places.
4. Do use the correct taxonomy guide from each engine. Every shopping engine taxonomy is different, make sure you have the most up to date version.
5. Do check with the shopping engine regularly to make sure they haven’t added/removed categories from the taxonomy.
6. Do include gender and age information. If you sell apparel and accessories you MUST include the gender and age field as the CSE’s have unique categories for men’s/women’s/kid’s products like apparel.
7. Don’t use categories like “Gifts” or “New Items” or “Sale Items” is entirely useless information.

Here are links to a few shopping engine taxonomies:

Pricegrabber Taxonomy
Google Product Search Taxonomy
Shopzilla Taxonomy
Become.com Taxonomy
Shopping.com Taxonomy

We often see many merchants delivering feeds to the shopping engines with no sort of tracking method implemented. It doesn’t make any sense to just start sending data feeds and not have a way to track clicks and conversions. We’ve recommended that merchants use the ROI tracking solution from Become.com in the past, and suggest this for any of the other comparison shopping engines as well. But what if you don’t use those other engines, or don’t want lots of tracking code snippets on your website? You should use your Google Analytics account to help keep track of the clicks. This won’t always provide the most detailed conversion data, but you can still see click traffic. Here’s how to set up Google Analytics to monitor your shopping engine traffic with utm parameters. Not sure what utm parameters are? Check out this helpful Google Analytics article.

utm_source: Here’s where we suggest a high level campaign name like “shoppingengine” or “cse” so you can differentiate all traffic from the shopping engines.
utm_medium:  This is where you might insert the name of the specific shopping engine
utm_content: A lot of merchants will add the sku or product id here so they can segment reports based on their products.
utm_campaign:  This is a parameter that a marketer might want to add if they are constantly running promotions or sales and they want to distinguish the different prices or offers that are being pushed in their feeds.

An example of using some of these utm parameters on a product url would look like this: (Note- the first parameter requires a ? to join your base product url. For consecutive parameters you can use an &)

http://www.mydomain.com/product1.html?utm_source=cse&utm_medium=googleshopping&campaign=valentines2009

Once you’ve added the parameters you want and deliver your shopping engine feeds start watching your Google Analytics traffic sources reports. If you have conversion tracking enabled for ecommerce stores, you should also get a basic report on orders and revenue. You can create a custom segment in Google Analytics to show you only this filtered view.

SingleFeed offers advanced conversion tracking and can automatically add utm parameters to product feeds for merchants as well.

Note- If you are submitting your products to the shopping engines with an automatic feed from your store (ie- Yahoo! Store catalog.xml file) you won’t be able to have these parameters appended to your urls.