Google finally launched the Shopping feature on Google Australia on Tuesday. Google Shopping (formerly Froogle and Google Base) is a data feed driven shopping engine driving product and pricing into Google’s results. It’s basically free advertising and traffic, a must for any ecommerce site.

This was just launched Tuesday, so we hope what we are seeing is phase one. As of today, Google AU is only showing the products if the user clicks on Shopping on the left nav menu. This extra click will not product much traffic, especially this early. On Google US, five shopping results are displayed as part of Universal Search, directly on page one. They have enticing pictures, pricing, reviews stars, and store names. As a preview of the prominent attention we can expect in AU once they put the results mixed in with natural results, I googled ‘vacuum cleaner’ on Google US:

Currently many of the items displayed in Shopping AU are Ebay listings, but we expect that to become more robust as businesses learn how to push the data to Google. We have been assisting our clients with this in anticipation of this day. Google gives priority to the age of the product feed, so the sooner you are participating, the better.   Visit the Google Merchant Center to get instructions on submitting your data.

Only products fed to Google will show up here, so we recommend two immediate actions: get your data feed to google, and set up your product reviews using the hreview microformat John wrote about last week.

Tags: ecommerce, google base, google shopping, universal search

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Google, internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.