Picture the scenario. A potential customer finds your product on Google Shopping, with a price including shipping that matches their budget perfectly – they click. Sounds perfect, right?
Next, imagine that the same customer gets to your website only to find that the resulting price is actually considerably more than what they’ve just seen. The customer and your business have both just fallen prey to the same issue; inaccurate shipping costs.
To help solve this problem Google has recently introduced a new shipping configuration tool within the Google Merchant Center. Google’s new shipping tool helps merchants construct more accurate shipping rates for their products, which is beneficial to both your customer and your business. Your customer can get the product they’re after for the correct price, and your business can avoid paying for clicks that don’t lead to sales.
Here’s a rundown of the new shipping tool’s features:
Enhanced shipping rules
Businesses can select from a choice of shipping methods, which also includes options to customise them by setting specific rules.
Multiple shipping methods
Enables Google to automatically display the lowest possible price to the user by differentiating between different shipping methods, such as ground or express delivery. This also allows flexibility in shipping prices.
Location customisation
Merchants can now easily set up different rates based on shipping destinations using countries, states, cities and town. This will reduce inaccurate shipping costs to be displayed.
Exclusion options
Businesses can easily indicate when products will not ship to certain regions, thus reducing the number of paid-for clicks that don’t lead to sales.
Shared library
It’s now possible to create a reusable shared library of shipping methods which can be reused across any of a merchant’s custom configurations; saving time spent optimising the tool.
Accurate listings just got easier
Introduced in parallel to this tool is a new shipping attribute which allows merchants to apply labels such as “perishable” and “bulky” to groups of products that require specific shipping rates, or even a label for promotional products. If your business is already using Merchant Center, your current shipping settings will be automatically added to the new tool, and you’re ready to get started immediately. If you’re not signed up to Merchant Center, perhaps now is the time to do it.
Merchant Center is a great tool which helps businesses upload product listings for the Google network, paying only when a potential customer clicks on your listing. With the addition of this new shipping tool, it just got even easier to provide accurate information about your product’s shipping to your customers.
To get up to speed on the latest addition to the Merchant Center arsenal, Google is hosting a hangout on September 16th, and you can sign up for that here.
