Google Shopping API

When Google announced to shut down its Search API for Google Shopping in March 2013, tens of thousands of retailers were scared to lose their overview of the market. We at metoda saw this as the opportunity to become the world’s leading provider in e-commerce market data:

“We’re deprecating our Search API for Shopping, which has enabled developers to create shopping apps based on Google’s Product Search data. While we believe in the value this offering provided, we’re shifting our focus to concentrate on creating a better shopping experience for users through Google Shopping. We’ll shut the API down completely on September 16, 2013.” – Google Official Blog

Before the sunset, metoda focussed on providing competitive price analysis and competitive pricing software to medium and large retailers. When we read this announcement, however, we started investing heavily in the know-how and technology needed to scrape Google Shopping reliably and in real-time to replace Google’s own API as a data provider with our new product Price API.

And it is good we invested so heavily. If you have ever tried to scrape Google at scale yourself, you know that it is hard. Google really knows how to make it difficult.

Today, hundreds of retailers turn to Price API when they need reliable prices from Google Shopping, because it is hard to find a reliable data provider for Google Shopping data. We are very pleased to support so many amazing retailers building themselves a competitive advantage with Price API.

Their use cases include, but are not limited to:

Competitive pricing - increasing margin and sales for leads from Google Shopping by outperforming your competitors
Competitive price analysis and monitoring - understanding their competitors on Google Shopping to form winning strategies
Online marketing optimization - Increasing the ROI of their Google Shopping marketing spend
Assortment optimization - identifying bestselling and top ranking products to add to assortment
Cross-border selling - identifying opportunities for selling your products in other countries by comparing prices of potential markets
Product Listing Ads Optimization: Adjusting your bids based on your current search result position, add product description information that you are missing
Seasonality tracking: Monitor when your competitors start the sales season and getting rid of their stock & reducing prices so that you could set up counter campaigns and also start considering your assortment structure for the new season
Cost management: Always be aware of the competitive situation and start reviewing your product cost if you can’t offer competitive prices in comparison with your competitors. If you spot a retailer having prices below Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) and Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Prices (MSRP), let your suppliers know and use it as a bargaining ground for renegotiation of purchasing prices.

Do you want to implement any of these activities in your company?

Then you can focus on your field of expertise and let our team of experts do the data collection.