We asked our contacts from each of the shopping engines ranked in our Top 10 to give us three tips to help merchants make more money in 2011. At the bottom we added a couple of bonus tips. Enjoy!
1. Submit data frequently.
Make sure you’re submitting frequently enough to accurately reflect your stock status and price for in-demand items. During the holidays, popular products go in and out of stock quickly, and prices change frequently as well. Submitting fresh data regularly gives shoppers a better experience on Google Product Search, and on your site.
2. Audit your data.
Do an audit of your data to make sure you’re in compliance with our policies and that your data is complete and accurate. This will help ensure that your feeds and products stay active.
2a. CPC Strategy Insight: Double check your condition column and make sure any items that aren’t new are marked as so. Simple mistakes like this can cause your feed to go offline.
3. Submit shipping and tax data.
Especially if you offer free or reduced-cost shipping, including these attributes is a great way to differentiate your listings from other merchants.
*BONUS TIP –
If you have physical retail stores, make sure you are submitting your data to Google Places, so your customers can find your stores easily when doing their last-minute shopping.
*BONUS TIP #2 –
Have you checked to see if the keyword data you’re inserting into your product_type column is accurate? Get more traffic by abiding by Google’s category taxonomy.