On the 22nd of September 2011 Google changed its policies for the Google Product Search. The Google Product Search is where you type what you want into Google and you go to shopping or sometimes it shows up in between the organic listings.
Venders who list their products on the Google shopping for free will know this as Google Merchant Center (Froggle or Base depending on your country.) For many years venders have been selling their products on the Google Shopping pages without much of an issue. There are rules and policies to follow but generally speaking no one really ran into any problems.
Any issue a merchant ever ran into could be quickly fixed, maybe a misunderstanding of your website or a problem with the technical side of how you upload your products. All of this changed on the 22nd of September. The new policies were to be enforced and the technical aspects of the feed were also changed. This does not pose a major issue. Ask any developer and they will tell you that such changes are normally welcomed and easy to pre-empt.
However Google made some mistakes, some major mistakes. Let's skip ahead to the current date, the 5th of October, the Google forums are a mess with companies going out of business, merchants unable to get answers and everyone being left in the dark by Google.
When the new spec for the feed was released there was no full solid way to test any of it, no one really knew how it would act. Failure on Google's behalf for not providing updated tools or services to assist with the new policies (at the time of writing the Merchant Center is unchanged and thus just as unhelpful.) No one really knew how this would affect them, Google kept on saying they would enforce the new policies with some aggression and frankly based on the lax in the past I don't think anyone believed them.
Now coming up to the big change you would think there would be a planned staggered system (e.g. USA first then after a month trial, the UK etc.) There was no staggered release. Google Shopping for the first time demanded a global change of everyone. Whatever the Google Shopping Team wanted to change, it was big. Still one email was sent out a month before the 22nd of September as a reminder.
I would at this part like to point out that if your business runs on Google Apps the majority of emails from Google by default go to your spam. That is right, you read that last sentence correctly. Emails from Google when you are using Gmail will go to your spam.
Now with the poor pre-planning and massive global change you can assume what happened did not go smoothly. You would be correct in assuming this. In the end of the day this was an extremely flawed plan from the start due to pressure on the Google Shopping Team to produce changes. Now I have never spoken to anyone from the Google Shopping Team, I have only ever read their blog. Google Shopping like many sub division teams (they are, when you think about it, only a department inside of Google Search) very unknown and basically impossible to communicate with.
What happened was the Google Merchant Center had a code behind change. I have no idea who on the development team got on top of their chair and said, "I have a great idea" but I can only assume he also takes his toaster to bed with him. The idea was that anyone with a policy violation or problem with their feed would be disapproved. The theory here is solid. Old sellers who do not keep up with standards will be lost, only the best of the best would be left. By removing all the filth you end up with a good as new shiny product. All the merchants that were violating the rules and policies will be punished, one massive sweep to show that messing them around yields no reward.
Now I don't know what Google Shopping or Merchant Center really looks like in the code behind, I do not work for Google, what I do know is I work for a Merchant who is at the mercy of Google, as the lead developer this can be awkward to explain. Not many people keep their job after walking in and saying "We are no longer on one of our top revenue streams and I don't know why."
The reason I did not know why was because no emails where sent. When you list products on Google Merchant Center and you are in a policy violation or whatever problem, your products are not listed and you are emailed, Google never sent the emails.
Let's have a little role play to demonstrate the extremes here. You run an online business selling shoes; you employ four people, one salesman, one developer, one accountant and one picker packer. You have a website that the developer maintains, a salesman to handle calls and raise purchase orders, the accountant keeps the books in order and keeps an eye on cash flow and the picker packer will unload the lorry and pack the goods to be sent same day. This is a completely sustainable and realistic image of a small starter online business.
Keeping with the role play you ask your developer where traffic and revenue come from, the majority of small starting businesses will have the same figures. You will get the most traffic from organic listings, you will buy traffic from AdWords to supplement sales with an aim to make bigger profits on repeat business and finally your best converting traffic is Google Shopping. Google Shopping traffic is made up of people who know what they want and have compared prices who now want to buy.
What would you do if you lost that overnight despite every effect you and your developer done? Now if anyone reading this is a CEO or director you might have just opened up your cash flow in sheer panic and now have some tough questions for your developer. A shock like that can very easily end a business. It is that simple, losing Google Shopping for a starting internet business can mean the end.
So when your business is on its last legs and no email has come through saying what went wrong you will start to freak out. You will be pointed in the direction of the forums. On the Google Merchant Forums you will find thousands, literality thousands of business owners just like you who have no fucking clue what is going on. One person will post in your thread (Celebird, who I am convinced has some connection to Google) telling you the only way to contact Google is to fill out two different forms.
After filling out these forums you will get an automated email in two working days saying they have received it, then nothing. This is where you will get desperate, your business is now in the hand of someone who you have never met and will never speak to. They do not care how many generations you have been making shoes for or how much money and time you poured into this. They are the faceless anonymous of the Google Merchant Center Support.
The worst part of this is, you need to use one of the forms just to find out what the problem with your feed is! So because Google messed up and never sent the email, you have to wait an unlimited amount of time just to know what is wrong. Keep in mind this has nothing to do with re-approving your feed, only just to find out what to fix.
Now you will search the forums for every shard of information you can find, this is where Google becomes the Double Edged Sword. You will now change everything and devote everything to getting your Google Shopping Feed back online, any change to your website will take minutes not weeks. Do you know why before it would take weeks? Because you would have been thinking about the impact a change makes.
Suddenly changes you promised never to make are happening all over the site, before you know it; you will be going against all your knowledge of the internet just to get your business and revenue back. Keep in mind Google Shopping and Google Search are not one of the same. If you do something stupid you could find yourself removed from Google Search (organic listings, the one your developer said the most traffic comes through.)
It is at this point you should know that Google Merchant Center was free and always will be free. Thus they do not need to give you a telephone number, an email or even own you anything. They are the untouchable Google and if you have been banned by the biggest search engine out there, you can only sit and wait.
I use Google products in all aspects of my life, my browser is Google Chrome, I make use of all the developer tools and Google API's, I use Google Apps, my phone is an Android Google Nexus One and even to the point of the maps application I use, it is Google Maps. This is by far a worse flop, an unforgivable flop, than Google Wave (which I might add I enjoyed a lot.)
The problem here is they wanted to do a massive global release and remove a lot of accounts, at which point no one figured they would be a massive influx of people wanting to have their feeds checked. To have your feed checked or to find out what the problem is, is a manual job. That is right, one of the biggest companies in the world and a massive provider of services still requires a manual help desk from time to time. So with that in mind you would think to staff it better coming up to the change.
Poor planning and poor implementation, Google will all its experience should know better than to green light what was set out to be a massive product re-vamping, without the proper infrastructure in place.
I for one am disappointed in the lack of communication from Google and more so by the lack of sympathy for the companies that are filing for bankruptcy. So much for don't be evil.
