Get customized suggestions for improving your product listings

Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:19 AM

We've always emphasized the importance of submitting high-quality product feeds to Google Product Search. This means submitting accurate, up-to-date product information in the form of attributes, as well as abiding by best practices for formatting these attributes. Doing so goes a long way toward helping shoppers find your items more easily.

Today, we're pleased to announce the addition of a new "Data Quality" tab in your Google Base account. On this tab, you'll find a host of suggestions for improving the quality of the item listings in your product feed. For example, you can find recommendations on the length of your title and description fields, or get a snapshot of the number of items in your feed that are missing key attributes. By addressing these issues, you'll be able to improve the quality of your feeds and help more shoppers find your products.

We hope you're as excited about this new tab as we are, and that you'll find the recommendations helpful.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager

New taxonomy to describe the product type of your items

Monday, October 27, 2008 at 6:47 PM

We've received some feedback from Google Product Search merchants asking for more direction on which values to include for the product_type attribute. We listened to your feedback, and today we're unveiling our new categorization system that you can use for describing the product type of your items. Product_type is an optional attribute that you can use to indicate the category (or categories) of the product being sold. We recommend that you use the category paths and values from our new product taxonomy.

The Google product taxonomy is a tree of categories that describe product families, with verticals (Electronics, Home & Garden, etc.) at the highest level, followed by more specific product families or products within these broad categories (such as Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders > MP3 Players).

If you already have a system of categorization of your own, you may also use that. Just include the full category path as the value for the product_type attribute (e.g., Books > Non-Fiction > Sports > Baseball).

We hope that this new taxonomy provides you with more suggestions on how to accurately describe your items, so that you can help even more shoppers find your products! For more information on our taxonomy and instructions on how to format the product_type attribute, please read this Help Center article.

Posted by: Weiying Li, Google Base Support

Introducing tax and shipping

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 10:18 AM

Tax and shipping estimation is one of the features most commonly asked for by shoppers on Google Product Search. Today, I’m happy to announce that you can now submit tax and shipping information for your products via your Google Base account. We'll soon be displaying this information on Google Product Search to provide buyers with more accurate price information, so we strongly encourage all merchants to start submitting it.

You'll be able to submit your tax and shipping data in two ways. You can:

1. Set default values directly in your Google Base account. The rates and values you set will serve as the default values for all your items. You can input these values on the new "Tax and Shipping settings" tab under “Settings” in your account.



2. Include values for the new tax and shipping attributes in your data feeds. These values will override any account-level default values that you have set for that item.

Please visit our Help Center article for step-by-step instructions and more information on formatting the new tax and shipping attributes.

Posted by: Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager