Tien Nguyen wrote a nice article, Amazon to Not Pay For Google Shopping Listings, in which he said:
In all it’s good news for retailers, large or small to not have to compete with Amazon for eyeballs on their products, similar to an MLB team learning that the high budgeted Yankees are bowing out of the season. Since Google Shopping Ads’ costs will be determined by the market, similar to Adwords (which interestingly enough Amazon is still on), one less high spender should in theory lower costs and increase visiblity for the rest.
On one hand I agree with him that it is good to not be competing with Amazon in Google Shopping. Lower ad costs will be good, too. At one time it seemed that every time I looked at a Google Shopping price comparison Amazon was at the top of the list. In recent months I found more and more instances in which Amazon was not the low cost price leader. The bad news is that even when we were the price leader, we were not getting either the clicks or the conversions.
Our marketing guy is pretty skeptical about Google Shopping Ads. Our trial run with Google Shopping ended with terrible conversion rates compared to Google Adwords. We are getting a better bang for our advertising buck with Google Adwords. Part of the problem is that Google Shopping and Adwords are competing against each other for the same sale rather than being complimentary or additive. When I look at the potential for this channel, I am pretty dismayed. Google Shopping has the most comprehensive comparison shopping list out there and we are getting about the same sales from Google Shopping as we are getting from Shopzilla. Our Nextag sales are even better. I don’t get it.