Friday, September 4, 2009

Google Shutting Down Shop Feeds

Many handmade sellers are receiving the following e-mail today:

Hello,

We're happy to let you know that as of September 3rd, individual sellers on marketplaces no longer need to submit feeds to Google Product Search. Going forward, marketplaces will be responsible for submitting a feed of all their sellers' items, so we will be retiring your account to avoid duplicate entries on Product Search. Your marketplace will also be responsible for ensuring that your feeds are up-to-date and compliant with our policies.

In most cases, marketplaces already submit feeds of their sellers' items. If you have any further questions about your items or Google Product Search, please contact your marketplace. We look forward to continuing to display your products, and hope you enjoy the new streamlined submission process.

Sincerely,

The Google Team


What does this mean? According to Google's blog, it means that sites like Etsy, 1000 Markets, and others that do not currently submit product feeds for their individual sellers will have to start doing so if they want their items to continue being searchable in the Google Product Search.

At this early date there are still many questions sellers have. Will these sites be taking over product submission for us? Will we still have access to statistics?

The deadline for the new policy is December 1, 2009. Most individual shop feeds are still live at this point, but Google says it will start shutting them down beginning today.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I would guess because google tends to be reasonable about this sort of thing that the feeds they'll start shutting down first will be sellers on marketplaces that already feed the products in.

Bookman said...

I posted the question in the Google forums, but it is rapidly turning into a flame session over CafePress.