Google Shopping Will Soon Charge Merchants for Listings

Posted in Organic SEO, Search Engine News by David Rodecker, on June 5, 2012 | 2 Comments

Soon, online retailers will have to pay in order to have their products displayed on Google Shopping. Currently, retailers can provide information to Google about their products and have them displayed on the site for free. However, Google has made the decision to begin charging for its product listings.

The listings will also be displayed differently after Google begins charging for the service. Currently, when someone searches for a certain product, such as “vacuum cleaner,” the top five most popular vacuum cleaners from the shopping page are displayed under a few organic listings on the results page. After the change, those links will begin to appear above the main search results with images of what Google thinks are the most relevant products on the Google Shopping site.

While some marketers are happy about the new Google Shopping site, others fear that it could be the beginning of the end of Google’s free business listings. Small retailers also worry that paid Google Shopping listings will make it difficult for them to compete with the large advertising budget of big online retailers.

What do you think about paid product listings in Google Shopping; is good thing or a bad thing?

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  • http://www.CaddyGolfCartParts.com Christian

    I think that this is terrible for google to do. They are going to essentially destroy the American small businesses. Especially now with so many small businesses struggling they decided to take a few more bucks out of their pockets. I guess when a company gets to be as large as google their employes just loose their souls and only dream of the almighty dollar. It would be nice if they would consider small businesses with this plan and offer some assistance to company’s that have little in the way of advertising expense and I’m not talking about $100 which will be spent in the matter of days. They should develop a grant program for small company’s so they can apply yearly for funds just so they can continue functioning as they had for free. These are just the ramblings of an irritated small business owner.

  • Oker

    I will use bing or amazon now, google is becoming an abomination of searchers. If google charge too many fees on merchants, then merchants will have no other way but increase their price, end result is we will pay more money, which is really sucks, mean while Bing stays free, and will attract more merchant that can offer better prices for searchers. I will buy amazon stock as well since sooner or later shopper will just go to amazon if they cannot find a competitive products on google.