LoveYourFeed.com

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.

Many merchants have asked how they establish seller ratings for the listings on Google Product Search so I thought I’d take a moment to explain.

Merchant seller ratings on Google Product Search are collected from numerous sources including Epinions, Google Checkout, Mr. Rebates, Pricegrabber, ResellerRatings, Bizrate/Shopzilla, and a few others. These sites collect ratings via post order surveys, or email follow ups, or open contribution by shoppers.  Take note that some of the other shopping engines ratings will be shared with Google so it makes sense to implement the post checkout pop up surveys. If you offer Google Checkout then you’re in luck because becuase Google will send out an email to customers automatically to share their rate their experience.

Based on our experience, there is no setting that can be configured, or request that can be made to get your reviews populated. It just takes time for Google to collect and gather reviews from these 3rd party sources and then display them. Even if Google has several ratings collected, that may not be enough to get them displayed right away and you’ll have to wait until mass updates are made to their system.  This is from Google Checkout Merchant Help section about ratings and reviews, “Google Checkout reviews are also displayed on Google Product Search results. Please note, reviews displayed here aren’t added in real-time. As a result, you may notice a delay between receiving a new review and its addition to your rating in Google Product Search results.” I also found another help article mentioning “New reviews can take up to ten days to appear in Product Search.”