Google wants larger slice of holiday e-commerce pie

Google is offering retailers new promotional and sales capabilities in time for the holidays.

The online giant is introducing a number new features in its paid Merchant Center e-commerce service to help retailers promote and sell their products during the upcoming holiday season. Retailers can start showing their products globally with multi-country feeds (95 global markets total), which enable them to target multiple countries that share the same language by using a single feed in that language. 

For example, if a retailer uploads product information in German for Germany, those products may be automatically available to show in other German-speaking countries, such as Austria and Switzerland. Retailers will need to set up shipping and location targeting for additional countries in their Google Shopping campaign.

Starting in November, retailers will also be able to submit products to their Google Shopping feeds more quickly with automated feeds. To set up automated feeds, retailers can enable Merchant Center to crawl their website for structured data and extract their most up-to-date product information for the initial feed. 

In addition, Google is introducing user-generated images in product reviews on Google Shopping ads. Retailers can now include review images in their product review feeds. This feature is currently available on mobile in the U.S., with plans to expand across more Google properties and countries over the coming months. 

Other new Merchant Center features include an updated user interface with tools such as automatic image improvements, which remove promotional overlays on product images to comply with Merchant Center policies. Retailers can also opt their inventory to show on search surfaces in the U.S. and India for free, including rich snippets in search results and product annotations in Google images. Surfaces across Google will be coming to additional countries before the end of the year.