Google to make listing products on its shopping service free

Google Announces Free Google Shopping Listings

With the rising popularity of e-commerce, Google has decided to make an unprecedented move and offer free product listings on Google Shopping. This news comes amidst the growing threats to businesses and people across the world because of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

In the announcement blog post, Google acknowledged the growing dependency of people on digital commerce and the challenges businesses are facing worldwide.

“With physical stores shuttered, digital commerce has become a lifeline for retailers. And as consumers increasingly shop online, they’re searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.”

Google further added:

“In light of these challenges, we’re advancing our plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google. Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google.”

This is excellent news for everyone involved in the online shopping process.

For retailers, it means free exposure to hundreds and thousands of people who search for their product on Google. For online shoppers, this means easier discoverability of more products and a lot more variety that just wasn’t available before. For digital advertisers, this step means paid campaigns would be augmented with free listings.

What should users do?

According to Google, existing users of the Merchant Centre do not have to do anything to be benefited from free listings. For new retailers, Google says that “we’ll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.”

For more information, you can check out Google’s help centre, which has more details on how to participate in free product listings.

When will the changes roll out?

These changes will start taking effect in the United States before April 30th. Google is working on expanding it globally before the end of the year.

In addition, Google also announced a new partnership with PayPal, which would allow merchants to link their PayPal accounts to Google Shopping. PayPal now joins Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce as Google’s partners. You can read more about that in Google’s announcement blog post.