In a combined effort to ease hardships to e-commerce businesses from COVID-19 and the desire to advance their overall long-term vision for digital commerce, Google has announced that free listings will now be shown in the Google Shopping tab. The shift to allowing unpaid organic product listings into Shopping searches is partially a response to the current challenges facing merchants. With retailers closing doors due to COVID-19, more and more consumers are shopping online for a variety of products.

These free listings will be in addition to the current paid shopping ads. To participate, sellers need to opt in to Surfaces across Google in their existing product feed in the Merchant Center. It remains unclear as to how these clicks will be reported in Google Analytics (versus paid clicks), but in the coming months Merchant Center accounts will begin to see a Performance tab that will allow merchants to see the performance of Paid clicks versus Unpaid clicks.

Paid shopping ads will continue to appear at the top and bottom of the Shopping tab, with free, organic listings shown in the middle. Carousel placed ads on the Google Search page will remain unchanged as bid based.

The change is in effect worldwide.

In addition, Google announced a new partnership with PayPal that will allow sellers to link their accounts, making the onboarding process easier.

For more information, visit the Google Help page or this blog post.