Updates and changes are as much part and parcel of Google as a cold goes with lousy weather. Official statements say that Google hopes for more and better quality featuring of products on their search result pages . Correspondingly, free-of-charge product search will be abandoned completely in favour of PLAs (Product Listing Ads); and these cost money. At the moment these alternatives still coexist. PLAs are product ads that are uploaded with the Google Merchant Center by customers through data feeds.
Maybe you remember that some time ago, Google has decided that partners of certain marketplaces – as for example Spreadshirt shop partners – are not allowed to create their own data feed for their products. This is why we have so far offered to upload your products in our Spreadshirt feed: https://www.spreadshirt.co.uk/-C4426. But soon Google will limit the number of products allowed to be uploaded via our merchant feed. The space that will be available to us will be extremely limited then.
This and the prospect of having to pay for every single click one of our product receives in a PLA has lead to our decision to limit the number of products in our data feed. We will limit these to our Marketplace products, and take shop partner products off the merchant feed.
We do not like this development. It looks like there is another Google AdWords coming our way. Who exactly is going to benefit from this development is something that only time will tell… Yet another reason to give our SEO tutorial a thorough reading. As matters stand, search engine optimisation is still totally up to you and up to us today.
To make up for this loss, and to stablish another distribution channel in Germany, North America, Great Britain and France, we are going to offer some products on amazon there. Depending on performance (total sales, conversion rate, quality etc.), we will upload some Marketplace products next week, which means that Spreadshirt products are from now on available on amazon as well. For you this implies that you can potentially extend your reach, and there is no disadvantage for you as Spreadshirt covers the 15% sales commission that amazon issues. So in case one of your products should cut the grade for being one of our Marketplace products uploaded to amazon, you will receive your full provision when it sells there.
Hello,
are comments allowed? I have entered a comment few days ago but I don’t see it…why?
Thanks!
Hello,
about SEO: I totally agree with you, SEO is fundamental for every Spreadshop.
I would like to remember you that this summer my Spreadshop has missed TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags for a long time and this caused a loss of 80% of search engines traffic (see here https://forum.spreadshirt.net/threads/17738-Product-Title-Description).
Then you have fixed the problem but not completely.
Right now it’s impossible to choose a proper DESCRIPTION tag in MY PRODUCTS -> DETAILS page. In your SEO tutorial you say to add good meta elements (title, keywords and description) to every webpage but right now I can only choose meta TITLE (even if your platform changes it automatically) and no meta DESCRIPTION or KEYWORDS.
I know that KEYWORDS are useless nowadays but DESCRIPTION is still very important for search engines and to increase click-trough rate on SERPs.
Please, consider to let partners add meta DESCRIPTION to every product page and DON’T change meta TITLE.
Thanks!