Badge of Honour: Google Certified Shops

Google have rolled out a new accreditation for online stores called ‘Google Certified Shops’. If your store meets the standard then you get a shiny badge to put on your site and a label on Google search results. This label will do wonders for your store as instantly visitors to your sire will see this and trust your store above others lacking the badge. Google Certified Shops is still in its early days but really becoming more and more popular as the months go by!

How Will This Benefit Everybody?

1) Trust in the Badge of Honour!

Having a third-party as big as Google supporting your site will really boost customer confidence they are in the right place and feel okay putting their card details in to your forms! This in turn will result in more conversions and propel your sales and business forward – doesn’t sound too shabby does it?

2) Free Purchase Protection

The customer is offered purchase protection for up to £1,000 during the checkout process – this doesn’t interrupt the purchase and is totally free to opt in to for the customer! This way, the customer can purchase from you knowing they have the well trusted Google as a back-up if anything were to go wrong (rather than having a potential battle ahead with a stranger behind a screen!).

3) Improved AdWords Data

It is thought that Pay-Per-Click ads will be improved with the introduction of Google Certified Stores. The Reviews extension could be aided by the data coming in from Certified Stores assessments and also adding the Certified Store label to the relevant company’s PPC Ad.

4) Stand Out in Google Shopping

The listing for companies in Google Shopping will stand out from the crowded list once you have a shiny new Google Certified Store badge! Straight away, potential customers will recognise that your store has met the customer service mark and would be a great place to start for their shopping!

Do We Qualify?

Firstly, you will need to meet the requirements set out by Google. If labelled Google Certified, this means a store meets a variety of targets. These include (graded mostly on performance over a ‘90 day rolling basis’):

1) A minimum transaction volume

At least 600 orders processed and completed on a rolling 90-day basis!

2) Offers proven reliable shipping

This is based on at least 80% of orders being delivered in a timely manner and a respectable dispatch turn-around from time of order.

3) Great customer service

This is determined by another list of markers:

1. No more than 1 in 300 orders where a customer has opted in for Purchase Protection should Google be asked for help by the customer to resolve an issue
2. If an issue is brought up by a customer this must be resolved within 4 days from when the case was opened
3. Google must not have to pay out over £5,000 on a 365 day rolling basis

For an extensive list of guidelines, have a look at Google’s Merchant Guidelines here.

You Think You Qualify… What Next?

You can sign up for an account here and start entering your store’s details in.

Once you have supplied Google with the necessary initial data you will need to integrate the Google Certified Shops Magento extension in to your Magento Store. This helps feed the data Google requires to monitor the stores performance and whether it qualifies and is continuing to meet the mark once certified!

The Merchant Dashboard on Google will take you through the steps and eventually reach the Technical Integration page with the details needed for Magento. When integrated in to Magento you can return to the Merchant Dashboard and test the module has been setup successfully and whether the badge will appear correctly on your site across different browsers.

Right, ticked all the setup boxes… now comes the qualification process which is up to your store to meet the grade!

Intrigued? Chat to BED!

The deers are convinced that Google Certified Stores is set to boom over the next couple of months. We are encouraging our own eCommerce clients to have a read through the guidelines and see if it is a route they would like to head down. Soon enough, sites without the badge could fall behind especially when competing with other sites with the fancy badge on Google searches.

Want to know more or would like the deers to help you out with the Magento integration? We will gladly give you a hand, feel free to have a chat with us!