For all of you who believed the Shipping and Tax attributes were a waste of time and more so for those of you whom actually put it into practice! It is now time to reap the benefits!

Google has now implemented these attributes within the product search results. A newly added option to select free shipping based on your location is now available. Simply by entering your zip code, city or state the results will filter to show only free shipping relevant to your destination. As a seller if you have not yet implemented these features, I would strongly suggest that you do so a.s.a.p 

By conducting a search for “travel mug” with the destination set to California, without Free Shipping checked it produces the result of “Road Warrior Travel Mug”, $19.95 Selling Price and $29.65 with tax and shipping.(Fig 1.) However the same search with “Free Shipping” checked results in “Autotecnica Chevrolet Racing Logo Travel Mug”, $7.95 Selling Price and $7.95 with tax and free shipping (Fig 2.). Using the first search this product did not rank, however with this seller implementing “Free Shipping” they have now optimised their position within results. Lets face it who wants to pay for Shipping, if the option is there, 9 time out of 10, you are going to click it.

Many users feel it is not important to make changes until Google implements these within results. If you follow this procedure you are losing out on valuable clicks and possible sales from all the user that will utilise this feature on its launch. If you assume 50% of your competitors do not offer free shipping and you do, or they have not implemented the free shipping within their feed, although they may rank higher on relevance and even price, the option of free shipping will eliminate them from the results revealing your listing, which may be overshadowed by competitors within normal results.

The Tax Attribute is also now implemented within the Product Search results, again by entering your ZIP Code, City or State the results will show, the Price without tax and shipping as normal in large font, beneath this you will see in light grey the amount with tax and shipping added.For Example, using the search “baseball glove” and setting the State to “California”  will display the result of $389.99, with $424.25 with included Tax & Shipping (fig 2.) However, the same search using the location Chicago will display, the same top result as $389.99, with $395.98 with included Tax & Shipping. (fig 3.)

To sum up, it is always best to follow Googles guidelines. If they inform users that a change will be implemented then you can take for granted that this will be an important area for you to concentrate your time on. There are always going to be the sellers who stick with an original feed and only include required attributes or rely on generated feeds from the back-end of there website. Optimisation of your feed does not necessarily require hours and hours of endless work to see no changes in rankings, impressions or clicks. By utilising features that Google implement before the majority will always see you that one step ahead of your competitor and will with any luck bring in the sales.

So…. if you don’t offer free shipping? Have a play around within the search results using your own products as a experiment, or better yet, why not test run it. Choose a few products to offer free shipping on, use this as a guide. You never know, by offering free shipping, you may make much more than you lose.