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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!

So there are just 30 days until Black Friday, and a few more than that until Cyber Monday. You’ve hopefully got all your ducks in a row for holiday promotions, shipping, and are prepared for the increased traffic and sales. You have Google AdWords campaigns primed and ready to go, and you’re probably encouraging your affiliate partners with commission incentives. It’s the calm before the storm, the troops (you and your ecommerce team) have dug in to the trenches and are ready for the wave of shoppers, warehouse shipments, and customer support inquiries. Have you checked your shopping engine data feeds? What are you doing to optimize your products on the shopping engines like Google Product Search, Nextag, Yahoo Shopping or Pricegrabber? What about ensuring your shopping engine accounts themselves are ready for the holidays? Here are some tips for your Holiday Comparison Shopping Engine Campaigns. You can also review Ben’s post from last holiday season.

Check your feed for:

• Accurate prices – Double check the price for your products in the feed and on your website. During the holidays we recommend daily uploads of your feeds to ensure accurate
• Working URLs – We recommend taking a few minutes to spot check product urls in your feeds on a regular basis. This will prevent you from submitting broken feeds which could be very costly.
• Stock status – Uploading your feed daily ensures you’re posting the correct stock status and/or quantities to the shopping engines. You wouldn’t want to keep paying for clicks on an engine when the product isn’t in stock and the order cannot be fulfilled.
• Spelling/grammatical errors – No one ever wants to see typos and misspellings in your product data, and why submit poor data to the engines (especially paid engines).
• Google Base Expiration Date – If you don’t update your feed regularly (which you should) then when was the last time you submitted to Google Product Search? Check your expiration dates on your product listings, it would be bad if your items expired because their 30 days was up.

Check your shopping engine account for:

• Sufficient funding – CPC based shopping engines should have sufficient funds so that your account doesn’t run out and your listings go offline during peak holiday shopping. We suggest using the auto replenish feature which is available in most shopping engine account centers.
• Store information – the shopping engines allow for you to post your store’s support phone/email, return policies, payment methods and more. Be sure this information is up to date.
• Tax and Shipping – We’ve posted on this before and encourage you to update (or plan to) your shipping rates as needed.
• Promotional Messaging – There may be special programs or messages you can display with your listings like “Free Shipping”, displaying a logo, or phone number.
• Poor performing products – Products that don’t convert well on your site or other marketing channels need to watched carefully so that you’re not wasting money. Remove them from your feed and investigate after the holidays.

If  any of this sounds overwhelming, or you still have questions, consider the help of SingleFeed to submit, manage and optimize your listings not only for the holiday season but year round. Many merchant’s are benefiting from our product categorization, correct wizard, optimization and regular submission. Ask us how we can help.

January and February are typically slow times for retailers (with the possible exception of Valentine’s day), which makes this an ideal time to rethink, re-strategize, and re-optimize your sales and marketing campaigns for the coming year. Make sure to include a review of your comparison shopping engine (CSE) campaign and its performance. Here are some tips:

1) Deep dive into your data feed and look for ways to improve your product listings. Could your product names and descriptions have better keyword placement? Are you missing important identifiers such as UPC or MPN? Are there optional fields such as size, color, or material you should be taking advantage of? A thorough review can take a significant amount of time, but can be well worth it.

2) Review each of your active shopping engine accounts. Are your tax and shipping rules set correctly? Are your bids back where you want them (after the holiday rate increase)? Look at category and product level performance and investigate products or categories that did not perform well. Also look for promotional messaging programs and opportunities with each CSE.

3) Check some of your live listings. Are the product names, descriptions, and prices correct? Are the tax and shipping costs correct? Is your store logo being displayed? Is your promotional message compelling?

4) Ensure your analytics tool (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc) is accurately tracking your shopping engine ads. Make sure product URL’s are tagged correctly. Run a couple test orders to ensure conversions are being reported.

Once you’ve done all this, you should be well-oiled for a smooth-running 2009. For even more advice on how to optimize your CSE campaign, consider using SingleFeed, which helps online retailers submit, manage, and optimize their product listings on top shopping sites through a single data feed.
Happy New Year!