How To Show Google Shopping Product Reviews

How To Show Google Shopping Product Ratings

Google Shopping star ratings can be defined into two categories, the product ratings which we will talk in this article, and seller ratings. Both very different in nature. Seller ratings which refer to a service, require a minimum of 100 unique reviews and have an average rating of 3.5 stars while product ratings refer to the product itself require a minimum of 50 reviews with any star rating.

How ratings are added

Google automatically shows product ratings from reliable sources by matching several factors. The strongest being GTIN (bar code) or Brand and MPN. It is therefore recommended to show product identifiers. Google might match product ratings based on SKU and product landing pages, however, these are less likely to match than using product identifiers.

Requesting to Submit a Review Data Feed

Before you start requesting to send a review data feed, you need to read Google’s Policy to ensure you are 100% aware of the rules. Once you have understood the requirements you can submit a form to Google for approval.

Sources Google Uses

The best choice to have a higher success rate of having your products ratings listed is using Google Customer Reviews or 3rd party review websites. You can indeed also list reviews on your own site, however Google Customer Reviews or 3rd party websites have a higher authority level vs a merchants own reviews.

An official list of 3rd party review sites

Can I collect reviews on my own site?

Yes you can, however I would not do this. The reason Google uses 3rd party reviews is that these are vetted, using social and business validators such as Facebook, Linkedin etc…

When you collect your own reviews, there is no vetting process. So Google may never use the reviews. Hence why going down this route would be a waste of all your reviews.

Submitting Product Reviews Data Feed To Google Merchant Center

Currently Google only accepts a XML format. You can find a great XML product feed example.

Now you have created your data feed, you will see a new drop-down option in your Google Merchant Center when adding a new data feed. If it is not present please ensure you have been approved by Google. Alternatively, contact Google.

Checking If Google Has Collected Reviews

You can check if Google has collected your reviews, by replacing www.example.com with your homepage URL

https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/lookup?q=www.example.com

Tips

As much as this sounds unfair, if you have all 5 star ratings on every single review even if they are 100% genuine you will notice that the feed will be disapproved, Google uses a percentage to calculate the accuracy of the reviews, in combination of cross references your review data with other merchants and 3rd party reviews.

What Google is trying to do is to verify the truthfulness of the reviews.

Something you might not realize is that reviews on products submitted by other merchants might also be visible on your products. And same goes for other merchants, your reviews might end up on there products too.

What You Should Not Do

  • Do not write fake reviews
  • Do not alter the ratings
  • Do not rewrite the content
  • Do not submit reviews that promote other products or accessories
  • Do not submit reviews of low quality like “Cool, Product…”
  • Binary answers

Need Help?
Do you have a question or need specialist support? Get in touch!

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John King
7 years ago

Do you know of a service that can automate the publishing of a product review feed? Ideally one that allows you to sync up the product IDs with the product IDs in your merchant centre.

Emmanuel Flossie
Reply to  John King
7 years ago

Hello John, I haven’t seen any as of yet. I was planning on building this on my application, but have not had much interest for it. What I would recommend is creating an server side script to generate an XML feed from your database. Than submit it to GMC. https://developers.google.com/product-review-feeds/

John King
Reply to  Emmanuel Flossie
7 years ago

Hey Emmanuel, thanks for the reply.

I’m a marketer rather than developer. So this would be used for my clients, who mostly use Shopify for their eCommerce stores.

Odd that you haven’t had demand. It would appear that product reviews could help Google Shopping clickthrough rate. People like seeing little gold stars next to images. So I thought that would be important.

Side note. Have 3 websites I put onto DataFeedWatch a while back. Hadn’t heard of your product then. Only came across it through a Google search today.

The feature I wanted from DFW was the ability to manually select the product image that’s displayed for the shopping feed. Rather than use the default. Can this be done with Feed Army?

Emmanuel Flossie
Reply to  John King
7 years ago

Hello John, Most merchants opt for 3rd party review sites rather than there own, due to the steep requirements for showing your own reviews. Allot of merchants are a little cheeky and don’t have authentic reviews, thus Google has a very strict ruling, resulting in these reviews not to be included in Google Shopping. The success rate is much bigger to invite the customer to leave a review on sites such as yotpo or trustpilot. As Google has already validated these sites. As you are using Shopify I recommend using yotpo, allot of my clients are doing this and have great results.

In a way I do have demand, but I have convinced them to go and use the more successful route. As I try to look at the best interests for my clients.

With my application you can edit every single detail, using rules, manual edits etc… For example with your image, you can upload a different product image or if you know that the second image is always the one you want to use, you can than choose this in my application which than imports it from Shopify automatically or use a spreadsheet to change the image link.

Lots of different methods to achieve the same results. I’m always adding new features to support customer needs.

If you like, I can send you a trial invite and you can have a play with it. Send me an email [email protected] and I will send you all the details and assist you further.

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