Google Products and CSEs

One of challenges online retailers face is “reach”. Trying to get your products in front of as many interested consumers as possible can be tough, especially if your products live just on your website.

All store owners spend a heck of a lot of time trying to get traffic to their website through a variety of means; you know the drill, SEO, PPC, Social Media, affiliate marketing, display and all the rest.

When comparison shopping engines came into existence many years ago, they attempted to help online retailers by allowing them to feature some, or all of their products on their websites (for a fee, usually on a cost per click basis). Some of the biggest players here in Australia include Ge

One of challenges online retailers face is “reach”. Trying to get your products in front of as many interested consumers as possible can be tough, especially if your products live just on your website.

All store owners spend a heck of a lot of time trying to get traffic to their website through a variety of means; you know the drill, SEO, PPC, Social Media, affiliate marketing, display and all the rest.

When comparison shopping engines came into existence many years ago, they attempted to help online retailers by allowing them to feature some, or all of their products on their websites (for a fee, usually on a cost per click basis). Some of the biggest players here in Australia include GetPrice, MyShopping and AuShopping.

All online retailers had to do was create a “feed” which contained all the information about a product, so that the comparison shopping engine (CSE) could pick up and display it on their own website.

Pretty simple.

Of course Google has been eyeing off this system for awhile and has decided to get in on the action a lot more seriously than it ever has before by expanding Google Products into lots of countries including here in Australia (in April).

Will it mean the death of CSEs? I don’t think so.

I remember about three years ago espousing the end of affiliate marketing portals like Clixgalore and Commission Junction because Google decided to create its own affiliate network – but as Mark Twain once said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.

An interesting article was written recently by Wai Hong Fong (co-founder of Ozhut) at Power Retail about the death of CSE’s, which sparked a passionate response from David Whiteman, marketing director of GetPrice.com.au.

I think what’s been interesting about Google’s recent changes to its algorithm (the Panda/Farmer update) has been the way it appeared to target CSEs and remove millions of their pages from the index in one fell swoop.

For example, about two years ago www.myshopping.com.au had 18 million pages indexed by Google.

Today they’re down to “just” 6.9 million.

All the comparison sites have experienced similar declines.

Here in Australia, Google Products or Google Shopping has started to show up in the search results but really only for electronics (that I can see anyway).

The early adopters such as Dick Smith, Bing Lee and Sony are benefitting from what I would describe as a severe lack of competition.

It’s really simple to get your products featured on Google Shopping, simply visit – create a product feed and wait.

Obviously the next question is how do you rank well within Google Shopping? That’s a whole other blog post right there, but there are some really interesting insights here.

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1. Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.