TUGCG – The Unofficial Google Commerce Guide

Over the past month (even the past week!), Google has made lots of Commerce related updates/announcement that retailers might have missed, so I thought I’d sum them up really quickly.

1.  Google Merchant Center (GMC) updated its data feed specifications, significantly cutting the list of attributes.  As far as SingleFeed knows, all attributes which were formerly listed are still supported, but Google Product Search might not be highlighting those attributes for refinement purposes.

2.  Google Checkout is accepting holiday promotions!  While Geckout is no longer footing the bill for these types of promotions, this is still a great opportunity for merchants.  From the blog post: “Last holiday season, merchants who ran a Checkout promotion increased their Google Checkout sales by an average of 209%, compared to a 25% increase for merchants who did not participate.”  Merchants who set up a holiday promotion will benefit from a special badge and what sounds like a ton of promotion from Google: Google will market the promotion through AdWords ads, emails to buyers, and social networking posts…Social Networking Posts???

If you participate, we’ll change your standard Google Checkout button on your website to the special promotional Checkout button that features an orange starburst labeled with the promotion discount. When the minimum cart requirement is met, the discount will automatically appear for buyers when they shop with Google Checkout from November 23, 2010 at 4:00 PM Pacific to December 16, 2010, at 4:00 PM Pacific.

Additionally, if you are an AdWords advertiser, Google will change the standard Checkout badge appearing on your Google.com AdWords ads to a new badge that features the promotion discount. These badges have been introduced to enable shoppers who search on Google.com to easily identify and take advantage of promotional offers.

3.  Data Feeds now influence your SEO listings.  While I’ve talked for years about the opportunity to mine your data feed for keywords for SEO and PPC, Google one upped me by putting the GMC feed content in organic results.  This is the Rich Snippets program (microformats).  For you non-webmasters, I’m not talking about the OneBox listings, I’m talking about rich product information within merchant organic listings. Check out the highlighted sections below for Amazon, HSN, and Williams-Sonoma rich snippet info garnered from the data feed.

Merchants can take advantage of this as follows: 1) providing a data feed and specifying rel=canonical (merchants need a lot more info on rel=canonical…way too many unanswered questions) on product pages, 2) providing markup to your site, and 3) through the Product Reviews program.  Read the Rich Snippets for Shopping blog post to find out more.

4.  Google Boost – Advertise your local business in San Francisco, Houston, and Chicago.  Local store information (location, hours, coupons, etc.) is going to become more and more critical as Google continues to help offline merchants make more money through local and mobile applications.  Assuming you’ve claimed your free Google Places listings (for any city – this is a must), it’s now time to test advertising through Boost.

Boost enables business owners to easily create online search ads from directly within their Google Places account. No ongoing management is needed after the initial set up, and this beta is currently available to select local businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago.

And with Google’s recent Android updates for Maps, this local information will be even more critical for the holidays.

5.  Product Ads.  In case you feel behind the ball in understanding Product Ads, don’t worry, there are more changes.  Google has hardened up its Product Ads attributes for the GMC data feed (stop using that prefer_for_query attribute!).  And Google is giving merchants more control of Product Ads through GMC (no data feed changes required).

I’ve been pushing the shopping engines, including Google Shopping, to talk about deals for years.  The economy stinks and shopping engines can easily push bargains and savings.  And many have done so.  Yahoo! Shopping did this really early on.  Become, Pronto, PriceGrabber, and the rest followed.  But Google is still a holdout in that they don’t allow a merchant to submit a Sale Price in addition to a Regular Price, and thus allow a consumer to see a 10% off, 20% off, or 25% off sticker/star.

Deals.  You hear about a hot new daily deal site every day. It’s hard to keep track.  I used DailyCandy back in the day…and today the company launched DailyCandy Stylish alerts for Android (only for NYC).  I’ve used Woot off and on for years…and now that it’s an Amazon company, expect to see Woot leverage Amazon’s relationship with millions of sellers (and buyers, of course).  Twitter is experimenting with @earlybird. Groupon and the hundreds (is it thousands?) of clones around the country and around the world are the darlings of the media and the talk of the town.  And for a good reason.  Groupon is an incredible business making a boatload of money.

Deals.  Everyone wants them.  Online or offline, we want deals, steals, free shipping, bargains, and more.  Check out Google Trends for Daily Deals or Coupons.  Just as Amazon will move into a category that’s performing well, Google will look at what people are searching for and make sure they can provide the right answer and monetize the result.  Why do you think they’re gearing up for games? The growth of Facebook gaming sites like playdom and zynga is incredible.  Google sees this and makes a move or 2.

If Google’s goal is to organize the worlds information, they’re kinda letting us all down on deals.  Sure, I can search for ‘deals’ on Google, but I get 1000s of so-so coupon sites that Google has already dinged on Google AdWords for basically being duplicate content.  And there’s no specific deal information for the 20M uniques who use Google Shopping each month.  It’s only a matter of time until Google gets into the game itself.  Just as they’ve entered shopping or health or finance or travel, Google will jump on the bandwagon and offer a deals site…maybe they’ll buy one as well, but I’m sure they can easily do it themselves.  Google already has relationships with 100s of 1000s of online and offline business.  I’m going to table the discussion of Google launching a Groupon clone for now and just concentrate on an online daily deal site like a Woot, but on sterioids.

Google Merchant Center recently introduce the Featured Product attribute.  The Google Merchant Center Featured Product Attribute is “Used to indicate that this item is a special, featured product; for instances, items on promotion or featured in a sale or circular,” according to Google.

I estimate that there are about 60K-90K active merchants submitting data feeds to Google Merchant Center (Google doesn’t publish this number, so this is a guestimation).  Imagine if Google starts tapping into this merchant base for deals, or as they call them, featured products.   They’ll have to start classifying these Featured Products better – sale, coupon available, rebate available, in-store special, etc. – but it’s easy to see an extremely powerful deal site start to develop without much work on Google’s part.  Merchants are already providing Google Merchant Center with a lot of structured data (UPCs, titles, descriptions, images, prices, etc.) that most daily deal sites or coupon sites would kill to have or currently beg to have through the affiliate networks  like CJ and Linkshare (super-affiliates need to work with data feeds from merchants as opposed to banners, buttons, and basic links).  Google Shopping already has all this data.  Just as they’ve started to publish merchant offers and take a cut of the transaction through Product Listing Ads, they can do the same for deals.

Google Deals.  Has a nice ring to it.

But for Google, especially with commerce related activites, it’s not about a new property, it’s about leveraging structured data to enhance Search, AdWords,  Mobile, Checkout, etc.  So expect featured products to show up on Google Deals, but also on Google Shopping, attached to Google AdWords ads, and sprinkled everywhere else.   If I worked at Google, I’d start pusing Google Deals OneBox results for searches like ‘Xbox coupon’ or ‘digital camera deal’ just in time for the holiday shopping season.

I’m sure that Stephanie and her team have plenty of ideas how to integrate Google Checkout into Google Product Search and other Google commerce products, but for inspriation, the team should just head over to Ask and search for any product.  Besides finding lots of Ask Smart Answers for shopping powered by Pronto (similar to Google’s OneBox results for shopping powered by Google Product Search), Ask is also giving Amazon a lot of real estate on each page.  However, it’s not just a simple link in the organic results, but rather a deep link directly into the Amazon cart.

Imagine Google adding a Google Checkout button to their OneBox results (and other Google Product Search areas).  This is pretty much a no-brainer:

(now that you’re done laughing at my graphic design skills), now imagine that link going directly to the Checkout checkout flow similar to the Ask/Amazon integration above.

Merchants have raised concerns about Google cutting them out of the equation by allowing consumers to search within a site right on Google’s SERPs.   Merchants wanted to control their own on-site search experience (think merchandising, cross-selling, upselling, etc. – although this was all before Google Commerce Search).

And after all these years, I’m still weary about merchants giving Google Checkout too much access and not getting enough in return (as consumers can hide their email address from the merchant).  What is Google eventually going to do with all the purchase data?  If Google is trying to organize the world’s information and they know you’ve purchased a camera from J&R through Google Checkout, what’s to stop them from sending a special offer to the consumer for a camera bag from eBags, another Google Checkout merchant?

Some might argue that this is actually all good for the merchant…Google could be a better marketer than the merchant.  But Google Checkout giving the consumer the option to “keep your email address confidential, and easily turn off unwanted emails from stores where you use Google Checkout” scares me.  As an internet marketer, I know that an in-house email list (your own customers) is gold, or better than gold.

Google has a lot of amazing opportunities to tightly integrate Google Checkout into a lot of their commerce properties.  That was one of the points from my Googazon post that started this blog.  The integrations between all of Google’s commerce related products are mind boggling.

In some ways this could be an amazing experience for the consumer and an extremely profitable flow for the merchant.  It’ll be interesting to see how merchants react and how Google addresses questions about disintermediation.

I won’t always be able to quickly give analysis on all Google Commerce related news, but at least want to share links to stories you might find interesting.  Here are two from this morning:

Google Commerce Search 2.0 Gets Refinements, $25K Price Point – eWeek.com

Google still trying to meet your shopping needs – CNET

For the first time in a while (maybe ever?) Google Product Search is not just listing a search box and links to popular product searches, but also product images on it’s homepage.  If you’re looking for Father’s Day presents, Google is listings what I’d have to assume are popular products/categories/searches for Dads.

Google Product Search looks a little more like a mall than a shopping search engine.  I’m sure this is just a test (Google runs tests all the time), but considering that Google is pushing images in Product Listing Ads and Product Extension Ads, maybe this will stay around for a while.   Why shouldn’t Google surface their top products with images as opposed to the normal links if this strategy can increase click-through rate and create a more engaging shopping experience?

In addition, Google Checkout has been running special deals for Father’s Day.  Nice to see Google Checkout getting some attention.  Expect more since Stephanie Tilenius previously headed PayPal’s merchant services business when she was at eBay.

As the Google Checkout blog states, “Hundreds of Checkout stores are offering exclusive discounts of $5, $10, or $20 on purchases made now through June 18, 2010.”  Now, if only Google Product Search could list the merchant’s Google Checkout promotion within the Product Search results as they do within Google AdWords listings:

Google Product Search/Google Shopping already allows consumers to filter results by those merchants that accept Google Checkout. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw these BIG, BOLD Checkout offers on Google Product Search/Google Shopping in the near future.  Wouldn’t this be a great way for Google to get additional adoption for Google Checkout?

Back in 2006, I wrote about Google OneBox results as part of a 4 part series that also looked at Yahoo! Shortcuts, Ask Smart Answers, and Microsoft’s Instant Answers.  Google’s OneBox results as they pertain to shopping search have mushroomed over the years and Google currently has a number of OneBox shopping results.  Here are the most common:

Basic 5-Pack:

The 5-Pack Normalized (multiple stores selling the same product):

The 5-Pack Normalized with Ratings:

Basic 3-Pack:

The 3-Pack Normalized (multiple stores selling the same product):

The 3-Pack Normalized with Ratings:

And the rare 4-Pack Normalized with Reviews

These OneBox shopping results are all obviously variations on a theme.  A OneBox result starts with a picture, title, and price, but can be supplemented with normalized listings and reviews.

The most common question I get is how a merchant gets listed in Google’s OneBox shopping results.  The easy answer is that the merchant has to submit a high quality data feed to Google Merchant Center.  What is a high quality data feed?  It starts with meeting Google Merchant Center’s basic data feed requirements, but the merchant has to go much further, improving the quality of the data and adding more relevant data to the data feed.  Think of it this way, if you submit the basic minimum data feed requirements to Google Merchant Center, you’re probably in the 50th percentile in terms of the quality of the data feed.  To move up to the 60th, 70th, or even 90th percentile, you have to add recommended attributes, optional attributes, custom attributes and improve the quality of the values of each attribute.  You also need to pay attention to settings like Tax and Shipping, you have to submit bigger, higher quality images, and you have to submit fresh product data whenever there are changes in your data feed.

And in general, a merchant has to take data feed optimization (DFO) just as seriously as they would SEO.  If you’re interested in improving the quality of your data feed, check out LoveYourFeed and start running tests on the amount of data you’re submitting and the quality of that data.

Google Shopper is a Labs product.  As an Android phone user, I’ve tested the application out a number of times.  The product allows you to perform an image search, voice search, or a text search for a product.  Image search recognizes cover art and scans barcodes.  Voice search is self explanatory, although for some reason, I’m always pleasantly surprised that it understands what I’m saying.   And text search is the normal text search you’d perform on any computer.  The application allows the consumer to view a history of product searches.  There’s also a way to ‘star’ a product like you’d star an email in Gmail, but I’ve never been able to figure out that feature.

Once you’ve performed a search, you get results that look just like Google Shopping search results.  And that’s because Google Shopper is just a mobile entry path for Google Shopping.  Which means that if a merchant wants to take advantage of Google Shopper, they have to submit a Google Merchant Center data feed.  Again, the power of the data feed at work.  Understanding one of the themes of this blog yet?

Once on a product page, which is just a stripped down version of a Google Shopping/Google Product Search product page, you have four options: see an overview of the product, compare prices, read reviews, and see product details.  As this is all driven by Google Shopping, all of this information is fairly straight forward, although I especially like the idea of reviews and product details.  I’ve stood in a Macy’s looking at luggage, scanned a barcode, quickly checked to make sure I wasn’t being ripped off, then checked out reviews of the bag.  And in comparing laptops, the product details came in handy as those little cards at Best Buy don’t always go into the detail I want.

On each product page, there’s an option to broadcast/share the product in lots of ways.  The way my Android phone is set up and connected with other services I use, the way of broadcasting products is similar to how it works for Picasa.  Clicking on the share button, I can send it to Facebook, Twitter (through whatever client I’m using), Gmail, regular mail, or text message.  I’m sure other methods of sharing would come up if I were connected to other services.   So in a couple clicks I could easily share a product with my friends on Facebook and ask for feedback.  Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten this feature to work in the last couple months as I get the error message: ‘Your link could not be shared.’ when I try to share it on Facebook.  (Paul, any help would be appreciated!)

When people talk about ecommerce these days, they are usually talk about transacting on the mobile phone.  Yes, this is a fast growing area of ecommerce, but I think the much more exciting prospect at this point is helping consumers make informed buying decisions when not in front of a computer.  This can be done through all the features that Google Shopper has available: check price, read reviews, see product details, share with friends, etc.  And then there’s the connection with Local stores, the so called Blue Dots and services like Milo, to help a consumer figure out if a product is available locally.  More on that later.

Product reviews are an essential part of online shopping. BazaarVoice and PowerReviews provide incredible value to merchants and eventually the consumers who use the reviews to make informed buying decisions.

Back in April, Google announced its Product Reviews Program in partnership with BazaarVoice. In the blog post, Google mentioned that it would display the logo of the merchant that a review came from on Google Product Search.

Through the program, we will begin featuring full-length product reviews and user ratings from participating retailers and manufacturers wherever it will help users with their shopping, including in our search results and advertising programs. On Google Product Search, for example, we’ll feature your logo alongside representative reviews from your site, increasing brand exposure for your web store at a key point in the conversion process.

I’m starting to see these logos.  Here are some examples:

Search: Nesco Professional FD-75PR 700 Watt Food Dehydrator – see logo for Northern Tool

Search: Cuisinart CBT-500 SmartPower 600 Watt Chrome Blender -  see logos for HSN, QVC, and Best Buy

Obviously a great branding opportunity for any merchant.  Google will have other partners in the program and will also allow merchants to submit directly if they don’t work with one of their partners.

According to this SearchEngineWatch.com article by Chris Sherman, Google launched Froogle as a free shopping engine back in December of 2002.

Froogle is organized as a directory, with 15 different product categories.  These categories include Apparel & Accessories, Arts & Entertainment, Auto & Vehicles, Baby, Books, Music & Video, Computers, Electronics, Flowers, Food & Gourmet, Health & Personal Care, Home & Garden, Office, Sports & Outdoors and Toys & Games.

“Froogle shines particularly well with some of the more esoteric queries,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google Vice President of Product Management. This is because Google has tried to build a one of the most extensive product search tools available on the web, going for both breadth and depth of coverage.

Results are determined by an algorithm that’s similar to Google’s PageRank method used for determining ordinary web search results.  There’s no paid inclusion or any other way for merchants to influence the way their products are presented in results, says Rosenberg.

“Data in Froogle comes from two sources,” said Rosenberg. “Merchant feeds, and the rest is a crawl of web pages that identifies product offers.”

Froogle was an early ecommerce move for Google, working with merchants like Overstock to understand retail.  Froogle really didn’t take off like many of Google’s services.   Many reporters therefore called Froogle a failure.  I wouldn’t call Froogle a failure, I’d call Froogle a test.  A really slow, long test.  As far as I know, this was the first time Google took in data feeds from merchants for any purpose.  That’s a big change.

So why didn’t Froogle ‘take off’ as some would expect?  The main rumor I heard throughout the years was that one of the two Google founders liked the idea of Froogle while the other founder didn’t.  Without unanimous support, there wasn’t really a serious effort to improve the service.

I interviewed a PR rep about Froogle in September 2005.  They were definitely very closed way back when.

But by the holiday shopping season of 2005, while reporters were still not sold on Froogle, the shopping site was starting to drive traffic for merchants.  As one merchant commented on ComparisonEngines in January 2006:

And the great thing was that Froogle was free, a complete departure from the other shopping engines on the web.  I was starting to see the light…along with many other merchants on the web.

Froogle was both the way to submit products as well as the shopping engine.  In November 2005, Google launched Google Base to accept data feeds which would be used to power Froogle (as well as other types of vertical searches on Google Base). If you’re getting confused, you’re not alone.  Everyone was confused.  You can read Google’s first newsletter to merchants about Google Base over at ComparisonEngines.com.

While the name of the official submission method changed, what’s more important is that Google started to change the way merchants thought about their data.  They started to talk a lot about attributes.  And what’s really cool is that Google started to allow some flexibility of attributes, basically admitting that it didn’t know everything about every product.  The merchant was the expert.  None of the established shopping engines (NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, etc.) allowed for this type of data feed customization.

We’ve also expanded our product feed format to include some new standard fields (now called attributes). You can specify everything from quantity and unit price to accepted forms of payment and even define your own attributes. If you have product information that doesn’t fit into one of our defined attributes.

I was critical of Froogle and Google Base back in December of 2005, writing a series of posts: Froogle Spam, Froogle Leftover Spam, and Cleaning up Froogle – One Post at a Time.  But Froogle kept moving in the right direction.

In 2007, Google ditched the name Froogle and replaced it with Google Product Search.  Google was getting smarter about branding.   While Froogle was a cute name, Google Product Search aligned the shopping site’s name with many other Google services.  And it was around this time that Google started to commit resources to further developing its shopping site.

Whenever analysts ask me about Google’s commerce ambitions, I tell them to watch Epic 2014 or 2015.  Not all of Epic’s predictions have panned out and many aren’t applicable to ecommerce, but it’s a thought provoking starting point for this blog.

Go ahead, click on the pic below.  You might have seen the video before, but it’s an important 8min reminder of Google’s potential in many areas.

Googlezon as imagined in Epic 2014

Epic 2015′s focus isn’t commerce, but 4:36 into the video, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson imagine the creation of Googlezon:

Google and Amazon join forces forming Googlezon.  Google supplies the Google Grid and unparralleled search technology.  Amazon supplies the social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure.  Together they use their detailed knowledge of every user’s social network, demographics, buying habits, and reading interests to provide total customization of content and advertising.

What Robin and Matt didn’t imagine is that Google itself would create its own commercial infrastructure, Googe Checkout.  In June of 2006, Google Checkout launched in the US.  This provides Google with all it needs to provide an end to end commerce experience imagined in Epic 2015.  Google has the search technology, social recommendation engine (think Google Product Reviews program), commercial infrastructure (think Google App Engine and Google Checkout), and detailed knowledge of every user’s social network (think Facebook Connect), demographics (think Google Analytics), and buying habits (think Google Checkout).

The key is tying all of these pieces together to provide “total customization of content and advertising.”  You can see Google starting to do this with Google Merchant Center and the Google Merchant Center data feed.  While not the lynchpin of Google’s commerce efforts, the Google Merchant Center data feed is damn close.

The Google Merchant Center data feed powers Google Shopping (aka Google Product Search), Extension Ads (a Google AdWords product), Google Product Ads (a Google Affiliate Network product), Google Commerce Search, Google Mobile Shopping (Blue dots!), and it’s easy to make the leap to believe that the Google Merchant Center data feed will also power Google Places, Google’s updated version of Local Business Center (it is now powered by a separate Business Feed).  I  joked early on that SingleFeed’s tag line should be ‘One Feed to Rule them All’ and it seems it would be an equally appropriate tag line for Google Merchant Center.  With GMC’s (yes, it’s time for an acronym) hooks into other Google produts, you can start to picture of all the ways Google could power or enable commerce for merchants.

Don’t worry, I’ll explain all of these pieces in more detail and give plenty of examples.  That is in fact the point of this blog!