Online shopping — we all do it. Heck, it’s arguably the greatest thing since sliced bread. (Did you know you can shop online for that, too? Crazy.)
But, have you ever been looking for a product and wanted to shop among a variety of brands and labels? This can be a pretty clunky process if you’re hopping between ecommerce websites.
This is where online shopping marketplaces come in handy. Think: Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and — you guessed it — Google Shopping.
Google Merchant Center is simple to set up, is easy to navigate, and essentially serves as your home base for your products and product information. (You’ll manage your future Google Shopping campaigns through Google Ads, but more on that later.)
Google Shopping uses uploaded product feeds to index search results, but it pulls the featured images from the respective retail sites. Because of that, it’s important to optimize your product imagery and listings on your own website before you market them on Google Shopping.
With your images optimized, it’s time to create your product data feed. Your product feed tells Google all about your products. This data is essential because it helps Google find and display your products when people search for certain product terms or attributes.
When you search for a product on Google, the Google Shopping results you see are actually advertisements. That’s right — in order to get your products on Google Shopping, you have to pay. While Google Merchant Center is how Google gets your product information.