Does including shipping affect rankings?

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Does including shipping affect rankings?

How does adding shipping costs to your feed affect rankings?

robdwoods

5:05 pm on Mar 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

Does anyone have any experience with how adding shipping rates to your Product Search feed affects rankings? Our feed is pretty well optimized from a keyword and product ratings perspective but we do not include shipping in the feed. Our products are large and heavy so we can't offer a flat rate but have to determine shipping dynamically based on weight and delivery location. I can see that some similar feeds that outrank us do include shipping.

If shipping is included in the feed, how is it enforced or even advertised? I can find nowhere on the Product Search site where the shipping cost or weight can be found for a product.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can shed any light on this.

SanDiego Art

10:51 pm on Apr 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

I don't think it necessarily affects your rankings, except for when users sort multiple merchants by Total Price (Base Price + Tax + Shipping).

You can see where the Shipping Fees / No Shipping shows up on a product that has more than 1 merchant selling it.

robdwoods

11:05 pm on Apr 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks...just as an FYI...including "custom" fields that users might search on seems to have a big impact. We added them and traffic is up 30%

fabulousyarn

4:20 pm on Jul 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

robdwoods - just seeing this - what custom fields did you add, may I ask - am trying to decipher the rules and regulations regarding adding "$5" shipping or "Volume Discounts" but am not having much luck!

robdwoods

4:34 pm on Jul 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

what custom fields did you add

We added a bunch of fields that detailed different aspects of the products that were not necessarily spelled out in the product description. We sell flooring so we added fields that added data about the color range, surface treatment, warranty, edge treatment, etc. We didn't add overtly promotional verbiage, just additional data about the product which included keywords users might search on. As an example we might have a product with the color "dark oak" but which didn't say "brown" in the product description. Adding a field for color range with the value "brown" for this product helped capture users searching for "brown flooring", "brown hardwood flooring", etc.