Today Google announced that Google Shopping is now available to Australians using the Google search engine. Product aggregators such as Shopbot and Getprice have been around for years, giving consumers the ability to compare prices of consumer products across a number of online retailers. Google, as always, aims to do it bigger and better.

With sort and filter features Google has made the task of finding specific products a breeze. I suspect ecommerce stores will quickly be signing up to the service to make sure their products are listed in the results.

I decided to take the Shopping tool for a quick whirl.

Type in "Asics Kayano" and it still looks like business as usual with only the organic and Adwords results being returned. You would have to be on the ball to spot the subtle "Shopping" tab down the left. Clicking on the link brings up the shopping results along with a few sponsored links. Now more than ever etailers are going to have to sharpen their pencils to win business as consumers have complete transparency of pricing across the board.



I predict they are going to run it as is for a while until they release the shopping results into the organic listings as per the Google.com screenshot below.

Retailers or web developers interested in connecting their products to Google Shopping should read the official press release with information on setting up an account with the Google Merchant Centre.

We at Netstarter were ahead of the game and have already built the tools to connect our client's ecommerce sites with Google Shopping. Feel free to give us a call if you would like to get your products showing up in Google Shopping.