A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google has a new set of ranking factors specific to the Google Shopping tab named the Shopping experience scorecard program. The concern was that merchants are asked to feed these metrics to Google and that the merchants will only feed positive scores, potentially manipulating the metrics and thus their rankings.

Google’s Alan Kent finally responded to those concerns after they were aired two or so weeks ago saying that Google has “mechanisms in place to verify the information merchants are providing.” So some how, Google is able to verify that the products are being delivered in time, that the check out page shipping cost was what was actually charged, that the cost to return was accurate and that if the customer does return the product, it is accepted within a specific return window. How does Google do this? I do not know, but Alan Kent from Google said the search company can.

He also added that if a merchant manipulates this information they can be excluded from the program, he said “merchants attempting to provide false information will be excluded from the program as this creates a poor customer experience.”

Here are those tweets:

Not a full answer (and there may never be one published), but we do have mechanisms in place to verify the information merchants are providing. Merchants attempting to provide false information will be excluded from the program as this creates a poor customer experience.

— Alan Kent (@akent99) March 3, 2022

As a reminder, the Google Shopping experience scorecard will be based on metrics such as, delivery time, shipping cost, return cost and the return window. The information is fed to Google through a data feed from the merchant. The ratings range from “Excellent”, “Comparable”, or “Opportunity” on each metric. To see your performance for each metric and your overall score, first sign in to your Merchant Center account, then from the navigation menu, click Growth, then click Shopping experience scorecard. To earn a badge, you must perform well relative to other merchants in all the required metrics. All metrics are calculated daily and have a lookback period to ensure sustained performance.

You can learn more about this over here.

Forum discussion at Twitter.