Published in: Pricing

Manage price differences between your website and Google Shopping

Using Google Merchant Center to sell products offers many business opportunities. However, when using a price optimization tool, you may receive alerts from Google informing you of an inaccurate price.

We’ve taken the time to analyze the situation and identify a few best practices to follow in response to this problem.-

Google’s tolerance and acceptance

It’s important to note that Google accepts price changes made with the frequency and variance desired by merchants. Indeed, price changes are a business response to performance optimization that Google understands and accepts.

Protecting the customer experience

Google seeks to protect the customer experience, and therefore does not accept price discrepancies between Google Shopping and your site. This is why Google can reprimand “bad customer experience” and penalize it with sanctions.

No consequences to date

Several customers have shared this same alert with us, with no consequences to date. In fact, Google has put in place a mechanism of multiple alerts before sanctions are put in place. Many of these customers have Google as their main acquisition channel, and some optimize their prices several times a day. That said, the threat of cutting off an acquisition channel of such magnitude is rightly frightening, and must therefore be addressed with caution.

To alleviate this problem, the challenge is to minimize the time between the desired price change and the price change considered by Google Shopping. This time can be linked to two factors:

Existence of a Google cache

Contact Google for information on how often their cache is updated. This will enable you to plan price changes so as to minimize price discrepancies.

Quickly send price updates to Google

Sending price updates to Google should be done as quickly as possible to avoid your prices being up to date on your site but not on your Google Shopping. To avoid price discrepancies between the two platforms, you can, for example, obtain PricingHUB’s price recommendations as early as possible – overnight or even the day before application day, for example – in order to send them immediately to Google, and then update them immediately on your site (or not, depending on the existence of the cache) to reduce the chances of price discrepancies.

By adopting these best practices, you’re taking a proactive approach to solving this problem, and reducing the likelihood of finding yourself at an impasse with Google.

Would you like to implement a price optimization solution? Discuss it with one of our experts during a demo!