Google’s Lack of Enforcement Puts Data Feed Experts in a Tight Spot

Posted by CPC_Andrew on October 5, 2011 in Comparison Shopping, Free CSEs

Thanks Barry Schwartz for the Google sad face logo.

Update: On 10/7/2011 Search Engine Watch picked up the story. Here you can read some additional insights to the lack of Google Product Search data feed enforcement.

Way back on March 14 Google announced that on June 6 they would begin requiring tax and shipping information from merchants.

The June 6 requirement was pushed back to September 1 with this announcement from Google who listened to a number of merchants who voiced their concerns that they did not have the resources to include this information by the first deadline on June 6.

The new deadline gave merchants nearly 3 additional months to find a solution to the problem.

On September 1, enforcement began and tax and shipping information was required. Today on October 4th, more than a month later, merchants still fail to include the information all together or include false data in their feeds.

Not abiding by Google’s requirements actually helps these merchants win traffic and sales because their product price appears lower on a Google Product Search comparison page.

A caveat before we dive in:

This post is not meant to criticize the individual sellers, the goal is to demonstrate how Google’s lack of enforcement can hurt the sellers who are compliant with the tax & shipping requirements.

Alright, lets go.

Example 1: Merchants not including tax and shipping information.

You can click the image to enlarge it.

In the example above 4 out of the top 5 sellers sorted by the lowest base price do not include tax or shipping information.

Follow this link to see for yourself.

• If you click through to 365officesupplies.com,

1. You need a $25.00 minimum order to purchase from 365 Office Supplies. That’s a pretty big caveat that most shoppers probably want to know before shopping there.

But lets not get off track. I went back, updated the quantity of that item to 20 in order to exceed the $25.00 minimum order and went to checkout.

2. I got far enough to finally find out how much shipping costs. $18.75. Yes. $18.75. No wonder they don’t want to include that information there.

• If you click through on The Office Dealer listing you’ll quickly see after you add a product to your cart, click check out, and then click the calculate shipping button, shipping comes out to $12.99.

• If you click through on the Discount Office Items listing and add the item to your cart, you’ll notice that a $4.99 shipping charge is automatically added to your cart.

Example 2: Merchants listing free shipping when there really are shipping charges.

You can click the image to enlarge it.

In this example 4 of the top 5 merchants when sorted by tax and shipping costs who list no tax actually have shipping charges.

Follow this link to see for yourself.

• If you click through Office At Cost, you’ll find shipping ends up being $7.49.

• If you click through OfficeFrog.com, a little notification pops up and states free shipping for orders over $65. Estimated shipping costs for buying just that one item for my location in San Diego, California was $9.88 at the cheapest.

• If you click through OfficeSaver, go to check out and shipping costs $7.95.

• If you click through GotoForms.com shipping costs $9.95.

In both examples retailers clearly have shipping charges that are not being identified in their Google Product Search listings and their rankings get a boost when shoppers sort by base price or tax and shipping charges.

The consequences of this lack of enforcement:

1. Shoppers get a bad shopping experience. Google’s product comparison page lies, it’s not accurate, so the consumer must shuffle through the listings to find the real lowest price of the item. By misinforming shoppers Google is risking that these shoppers use websites like Amazon.com for more reliable product information.

2. Merchants that abide by the rules on Google Product Search see their traffic suffer because it goes to retailers with the lowest base price.

3. Merchant traffic as a whole may stagnate or decrease over time because consumers choose other more accurate shopping portals to shop from (see point 1).

At the end of the day we model our best practices around complying with Google’s product feed requirements as much as possible. Too many merchants know how quickly their Google Merchant Center can turn from great to horrible with one flip of a switch.

But what do we do to compete with those who don’t follow Google’s requirements and benefit from it?

Here are our options:

1. Manually report the hundreds of merchants that are violating Google’s policy.

2. Un-abide to Google’s rules and reap the benefits until they threaten to de-activate that account.

3. Shut up and deal with it CPC_Andrew.

None of these look like fun solutions. What I propose is that Google revamps the way they enforce new requirements, starting with some real enforcement of the current product feed requirements today.

Stop making merchants decide how to play in the grey area of requirements. If they are requirements, require them. If you gradually enforce a requirement, give a boost in ranking to the merchants that comply to the new requirements first.

I’d love to hear your opinion. Post a comment below to share your thoughts.

P.S. Back on September 7th I first noticed this issue with one of our clients and reported it on Search Engine Watch.