Now You Can List Your Products for Free on Google Shopping

As consumers increasingly turn to ecommerce to meet their needs, it's more important than ever for retailers and interested shoppers to easily find each other where so many searches begin: Google. 

Every day, hundreds of millions of people come to Google for their shopping needs, making the Google Shopping tab an attractive place for businesses to list their products.

Previously, the Google Shopping tab consisted only of paid listings, but starting today free listings will appear alongside paid ads in relevant search results. 

Shopify is partnering with Google to make it easy for merchants to sync, submit, and optimize their products for these free listings through Shopify’s Google Shopping app. If you already have products synced through the app, your approved products can start showing up in relevant Google Shopping tab search results—no further action is required on your end. 

Install Google Shopping

Merchants selling in the U.S. can access this free feature starting today, and a global rollout is anticipated for the end of 2020.

Lowering the barrier to reach customers through Google 

With the introduction of free listings, eligible merchants can submit their products to be listed in the Google Shopping tab. From there, those products have the chance to be discovered by shoppers most likely to purchase them without having to pay for clicks.

While this does not replace Shopping ads, the introduction of free listings in the Google Shopping tab gives small businesses access to a popular online shopping destination when they may not have the resources to effectively run and scale their own Google Ads campaigns. It also gives merchants who are already using Shopping ads a way to supplement their paid advertising with free listings. 

Getting your products listed in the Google Shopping tab

Eligible merchants can use Shopify’s Google Shopping app to get set up. The first step is to follow the checklist to make sure you meet all of the Google Merchant Center requirements.

Once you have synced your product feed to Google Merchant Center and your products are approved, they can appear in relevant search results. 

There are also several steps you can take to optimize your listings in the Google Shopping tab and improve their discoverability:

• Make sure your product and store information is detailed and up to date.
• Submit high-quality images of your products that follow Google Merchant Center’s specifications.
• Ensure your product title attributes for each product feed are descriptive—searchers will generally ignore vague titles. 
• Consider the specific words your customers would type into Google to find your product and incorporate them naturally into the title and description attributes. Conduct some keyword research to validate your assumptions about how people are searching for your products.
• Include all relevant product feed attributes, such as Size and Gender to help the right shoppers finding the right products. 
• Optimize the product type attribute with at least 3 levels if possible. For example, if you’re selling Dog Blankets, you might use Home & Decor > Furnishings > Bedroom > Blanket > Dog. 

For more information on setting up the Google Shopping integration for your Shopify store, check out our help docs. We’ll continue to update you as we work with Google to make this feature available to more merchants over the course of this year.

Install Google Shopping

To learn more about how Google Shopping can help you get discovered by interested shoppers, check out our Compass course on Google Ads for Ecommerce.