Google published an internal interview on its Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman (who you know) and Irina Tuduce from the Google Shopping team. Irina Tuduce has been with Google for 18 or so years and she provided a super technical overview of Google Shopping and Merchant Center.
If you work with Shopping or Merchant Center, either organically or through Google Ads, it is worth a listen to.
Here is the interview you can listen to on YouTube:
Here are some high level topics covered in this:
- Google uses both web search infrastructure and a dedicated shopping search infrastructure to display shopping results.
- Websites with schema.org markup might show up in the “Shopping” tab or “Image” tab on the main Google search page (dotcom) with product snippets or rich snippets displaying price information and more
Merchant Center accounts let you do more, such as:
- Upload a product feed specifying your inventory.
- Utilize an automatic crawl feature that extracts product information from your website, even if not in your feed (requires schema.org markup).
- Control data refresh frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) for your feed.
- Perform product-level updates with automatic item uploads.
- View product performance data like clicks and impressions.
- Get optimization suggestions for products and markup.
Here are some of the differences outlined between Schema.org Markup vs. Merchant Center Feeds:
- Schema.org Markup: Open-source markup added to your website pages. Easier to set up but offers less control over data refresh.
- Merchant Center Feeds: Product data uploaded directly to Google. Offers greater control over data refresh and additional features.
Search Console connects with Merchant Center, offering the “Merchant Listings Report” which checks your schema.org markup for shopping results and highlights any issues.
Price Discrepancies: If the price on your website doesn’t match the price displayed in search results, it could be due to:
- Outdated data in your Merchant Center feed (update your feed).
- Data quality issues (contact the Shopping Data Quality team for further investigation).
- Policy violations (ensure you comply with Google’s Shopping policies).
- Crawl delays (Google might not have crawled your updated website yet).
And Google Shopping Policies: Publicly documented policies outlining what can and cannot be sold through Google Shopping results. These may vary by country.
Here is the transcript if you want to read it.
Forum discussion at X.