Google Product Search/Shopping's Erroneous Product Counts
One way a user can see how many products are live on their (or a competitor’s site) on Google Shopping is by using Google itself. By entering the search query site:sitename.com within Google Product Search, Google will list all live products sold by that merchant.
For example, to see what Amazon has listed in Google Shopping, one would type site:Amazon.com into the product search page:
Amazon has a monstrous 13 Million products live according to Google here, however we’ve found that for merchants listing a large amount of products, these numbers can often be off by significant amounts.
For instance in our Amazon example, on the side bar we can break the products down by price points.
There are four available, and since they are all-inclusive–each section should contain all of Amazon’s total products.
However, further investigation shows that something is a bit off.
If we view products in the first price point, under $25, Google says that there are “About 348,178 results”.
And from $25-$70, there are “About 253,252 results”; from $70-$150, 203,740 results; and finally for products over $150 Google says there are 208,140.
Taking the sum of these subsets, we get a mere 1,013,310, which is considerably less than the 13 million+ results Google reported earlier.
We’ve often had merchants with inventory counts that are really high, say 50,000-100,000+, wonder why not all their products are live when they use this search method, but it’s often the case that Google simply is giving a number that’s not very accurate.
To get the actual number of how many products a merchant has live then, the Merchant Center is your friend:
For the record, Google reports that this particular merchant has “just” around 90,000 products live on Google Product Search.
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