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Holiday sales totals hit incredible numbers this year, and much of that shopping happened outside of the brick and mortar stores, with various eCommerce retail outlets doing more business than ever before. If your shop is one of those that worked to attract attention from online shoppers during the holiday season, you may have overlooked a key opportunity from Google to gain a foothold in today’s eCommerce landscape - Google Shopping Graph. 

What is Google Shopping Graph?

Google’s Shopping Graph is a fairly simple technology. Using an AI-enhanced model, users see everything they need to know about a product - where to get it, what the price is, videos about it, reviews, and exactly what it can do for their lives.

Shopping Graph uses the data fed to it by retailers to display everything in real-time, creating a sense of accuracy that was simply not possible with traditional Google Shopping models. 

What Are the Benefits For Shoppers?

While this was truly designed for retailers, many of the real benefits happen for shoppers. Initially, it might just seem like a way to get the best deal and the most information on a given product, and it certainly is that. 

Google Shopping Graph, though, is so much more than that. It can actually help users locate the products they want. When they look at a screenshot through Google photos, search suggestions can pop up with lists of similar products, ensuring they don’t actually have to know the product name or brand name to get the listing they want most. 

It doesn’t just connect shoppers with products, though. It can tell them how many of that single product is left in a given retailer’s inventory, help them understand more about the product, and get that best price. 

More than that, though, because it’s connected to a shopper’s Google account, it feeds customers reminders of what they may have left behind in their carts across a number of different websites. It can also show different retailer promotions if a user chooses to opt-in. 

They can even link their loyalty programs from retailers like you to their Google account, which will then feed them all kinds of purchasing options. 

What Are the Benefits For Your Company?

Google Shopping Graph offers a number of benefits to your company, but the biggest one is pretty obvious - free exposure to billions of shoppers every single year.

Google claims to want to even the eCommerce market, and to some degree, they do, but more than anything, they’re looking to ensure platforms like Amazon don’t take over, and that means smaller retailers can really benefit from Shopping Graph. 

Exposure is key, but maybe even more important is that Google displays your product data directly because you upload it to them. That means you can demonstrate the benefits that are most important to your shoppers. You’re submitting product information to Google directly through the Merchant Center, and that kind of exposure is unbeatable. 

More than that, though, Shopify integration has been expanded through Google Shopping, so now you can show your products across Search, Shopping, Image, and YouTube without any additional work. Given the number of stores that run on Shopify, this could be a real-time saver for many smaller eCommerce outlets. 

Why Does It Exist?

Google has long been working to position itself as more than a way to research products but a way to actually ensure they can profit from those listings. Google Shopping Graph is just one more step in that direction. 

Google’s Shopping engine has been around for some time, but only for paid listings. Google opened their Shopping engine free to everyone in April 2020, and just a few months later, they made Buy on Google commission-free as well.

That redesigns the entire platform for many small merchants, making it far cheaper and more accessible than other platforms like Amazon, which demand as much as a ten percent commission fee for your sales. 

More than that, though, it incentivizes brands like yours to submit product data and makes them incredibly discoverable. The bonus for Google is clear - a higher profile and far higher ad revenue than they might be able to get without this. 

It’s a bonus both for merchants and the search engine giant alike. It seems to be working too because according to Google, the product catalog available on Shopping has grown by 70% and the number of merchants now participating has grown by 80%. 

Navigating the eCommerce landscape isn’t an easy task, but it is possible to tap into the sheer number of people choosing to shop online these days and reap the benefits of the increase in eCommerce sales. We can help. Learn more about what we do for eCommerce companies like yours every single day when you contact us.