Google Shopping Now Offering Free Product Listings

Google has announced in a blog post that organic product listings will be included in its U.S. Shopping search results starting the week of April 27^th. Just as Google doesn’t charge sites to be part of the Google Search index, listings for participating retailers are eligible to appear in these results at no cost to them.

Impact to Paid Shopping Ads: NO IMPACT
Paid listings/shopping ads will continue to appear at the top and bottom of the page in ad slots on the Google Shopping tab, just as they do on the main search results tab. Shopping ads will operate in the same way as they do today.

How to Access Free Product Listings:
Anyone with a Google Merchant Center feed will be able to participate in free product listings. Google Ads is not required to participate.

If you are a new user of Merchant Center, you can opt into surfaces across Google during the Merchant Center sign up process and start creating your product feed. If you need assistance, connect with your Partner Director at Location3 to determine next steps.

If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center & Shopping ads and you’ve already opted into the surfaces across Google program, you might already be eligible to show your products in these unpaid experiences, and no further steps are necessary to participate. Location3 will opt-in our partners with an existing Merchant Center feed.

Impact to Organic Search:
Google has not yet confirmed whether the expanded shopping feed will create new features in the search results, but we can anticipate that organic results may be pushed further down the search engine results page when the results historically would have shown the product listings.

If you’ve been utilizing Google Products Posts through Google My Business this would make sense for you to jump in as well. As we’ve seen Product Posts feeding into Google Products for free previously, expanding your product visibility with Google Shopping and taking up more real estate at not additional cost should help get more eyeballs on your product.

Recommended Product Page Optimizations:
With Google utilizing microdata to get clear succinct details about a product/page, it will be important to ensure that your product pages include schema that may be helpful on product pages which would include ItemAvailability and InStock markup.

Google’s preferred delivery of schema markup is through JSON-LD. We recommend checking to confirm that you’re using JSON-LD as your current implementation. If you’d like assistance with updating your organic listings, contact your Location3 Partner Director.