The Shopping Experience Scorecard program can help you deliver a great shopping experience for your customers.
By meeting certain criteria, you may receive:
- A badge on your listings that improves user trust in buying from you
- Prominence in placements on the Shopping tab
How it works
The program will monitor the experience you provide to customers in several areas, including shipping speed, shipping cost, return cost, and return window. You’ll be given a rating of “Excellent”, “Comparable”, or “Opportunity” on each metric. There’s nothing you need to do to sign up - your progress will be monitored automatically, and benefits will be applied to your offers once you meet a certain performance threshold.
While Google may make your offers more prominent on the Shopping tab or in promotional modules if you provide information for some customer experience areas below, you must submit information for all areas to receive badging on your listings. The program metric values don’t display directly to customers on an individual offer level. Instead, the program metrics are impression weighted averages, and are only displayed in your Merchant Center account.
Google will evaluate the information that you provide each day. Even though all metrics are calculated based on an impression weighted average, there's a fixed lookback period. So, if your rating has been in “Opportunity or “Comparable” for a while, it may take a few weeks for your improvements to be reflected in Google's evaluation. All merchants on the platform are eligible to receive benefits from the program and your performance is evaluated against all other merchants.
Keep in mind: If you don’t have any ratings or if you’re missing specific ratings, this could either be because you’re not currently providing the required information, or because your offers haven’t received sufficient impressions in the lookback period. Check out the Shopping experience scorecard tab to view the areas where you’re providing information and to learn how you can update missing information.
Example
Barbara’s Buckles has a blank rating for shipping speed. After a quick check, they realize that they’re providing shipping cost without providing shipping speed. So, they create a shipping service for their products that includes both shipping cost and shipping speed. After the lookback window passes, their rating updates with a new value to reflect their shipping speed, which may boost their visibility and performance on the Shopping tab.
Instructions
How to view your performance
To see your performance for each metric and your overall score:
- Sign in to your Merchant Center account.
- From the navigation menu, click Growth.
- 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.
How to improve your performance
|
Metric |
Description |
Set up links |
Set up links |
| Average delivery time | Information you've shared about how many days it should take customers to receive their orders | ||
| Average shipping cost | Information you’ve shared about the cost for customers to receive orders (excluding item cost) | ||
| Average return window | Information you’ve shared about the number of days customers have to return an item | ||
| Average return cost | Information you’ve shared about costs for customers to return and restock an item |
How is the Shopping experience scorecard program different from Retailer Standards?
Retailer Standards applies only to Buy on Google merchants, while the shopping experience scorecard program applies to all merchants. The goal of Retailer Standards is to ensure that Buy on Google merchants are adhering to certain service standards, while the shopping experience scorecard program is focused on rewarding any merchant who provides a great customer experience. Not meeting Retailer Standards criteria may result in penalties up to and including account suspension, while the Shopping experience scorecard program has no such penalties.
To opt-out of the Shopping experience scorecard program, you'll need to contact support via the contact us button below. Keep in mind there are no program penalties for not meeting a certain performance standard, this program is only meant to reward retailers who provide an excellent customer experience.