How is Google Shopping working out for you guys?

It was working well for us until around Oct 20.

[spica42]

We used to rely on Google base traffic and after Google stopped the program, we were in serious trouble.

Sales were way down in August when Google ramped up Google Shopping so we enrolled and set aside a budget to join the problem. This helped us recover a little of our sales.

However, since last week, our sales plunged again even though we increase our budget for Google shopping, we are no longer getting results. Anyone else have problems with Google Shopping in Oct?

Our feed doesn't seem to have problems and we are getting clicks; just not converting after Oct 20.

[spica42]

@webdevfv, just sign up. It's still currently free. 
bingads.microsoft.com

I tried to sign up but it says it's currently not accepting new users.

[Tonearm]

Has anyone had good or even OK results from the new Google Shopping?

[webdevfv]

I've had a bing ads account for ages but never seen the product listing / feed.

[Bewenched]

Well back on the subject of how it's working out for us, I started noticing weird things in our server logs starting 2 months back. Like a rash of competitors hot-linking to our images.... weird part was that the url to those images are only in the google shopping feed.

Many dont realize that Google as a Google Shopping API that's open for public use. Small time users of it .. less than 2500 queries a day it's free, after that there is a charge. So I can only assume that competitors were willing to pay the price to get what they wanted.

To stop this from potentially happening you have to go into your Google Merchant, then select data feeds, then select settings under each feed, scroll to the bottom and click the link "Set up advanced feed usage settings" and uncheck Search API for Shopping, but leave "Shopping" checked.

Funny they dont have a "Learn More" link like they do for the "Shopping" setting. It doesn't tell you that anyone can start up a page using the api and show your products....

I noticed when I searched Google for some of my titles that I use in the shopping feed that hundreds of pages were coming up..... and not on the best sites and most running ads as well.... these "sites" were using the shopping feed for their content.... our content.

Yes sometimes it was sears and sometimes some shopping comparison site, but 90% were crap pages that no one would spend more than a second on. I'm surprised that Google doesn't have some setting to let you decide where your content goes..... after all... we're paying to be there.

[webdevfv]

Interesting information and something I have perhaps omitted to look at in-depth in the past.

Does anyone on here have any information regarding this and whether it's similar to the Display Network, i.e. loads of impressions and clicks but ultimately no conversions

[Tonearm]

Can they use the API to retrieve information from your products such as Brand and MPN?

[Bewenched]

Yes, they can retrieve all the information that you submit to Google.

[Tonearm]

Wow. My products don't have brands, MPN's, or UPC's so I've been submitting the supplier name as the brand and the supplier SKU as the MPN. I don't think that's such a good idea any more since I don't want to give that info away to competitors. What should I do to satisfy Google's requirements in this case?

[Digmen1]

Looks like Google Shopping is going to go the way of Froogle, Google Base, Google Products.

And those were free!

Now people have to pay to be on a service that hardly anyone uses!

[Tonearm]

Is Google Shopping going better now for anyone?

[Digmen1]

Ebid.net is paying for all of its auction site listings to be on there.

But aside from that I hardly see it mentioned.

I certainly wont be listing my products on it for 2 reasons - its not in New Zealand and no one mentions it, and now they are charging for it!

Shirley some webmasters on here must know what is happening.

[spica42]

After throwing in some budget during december our experience is that the old free Google Base feeds works better than the new paid ones. Perhaps searchers trusts the feeds based results more than the paid version?

[Oliver Henniges]

I'm in a relatively low-competitive niche and have been following a sort of long-tail-concept ever since. Bidding a maximum of 12 cent on about 20k products over a threee months test-period in winter, I received an average of 200 visitors a day from google shopping. Quite satisfied with that, actually. (Note, that over here in Europe
the new product ads have been launched in October or so, and that the old "free" version is said to run until June).

Why isn't it possible to fine-tune bids on product level? (Or did I just overlook that option?). Just a single column in the data-feed-file?

Do you think such an option will be implemented in the near future, or will it be worth to "squeeze" the system by defining separate labels for 10cent, 11cent, 12cent, 20 cent, 30 cent and so on?

[Digmen1]

Well since only two people have posted here since the new year
one positive and one negative it looks like there is not much interest in Google Shopping ?

Are many webmasters using it
Are many buyers using it when shopping?

[webdevfv]

I never use Google Shopping myself, but the PLAs do appear on the main results page which is the main reason for me doing them.

Results are ok but cost as usual continues to rise - is the only one making money out of ecommerce Google?