Want to be a Google Trusted Store?

To be a Google Trusted Store, you need to prove to Google that you can be trusted.  Simple as that. Or is it?
If you can prove to Google that you actually ship the orders placed on your site plus you tell them about any cancellations then you get to display their Trusted Store badge on your site.
So what do you have to do at code level to gain this trust?
You have to:

• Add trusted store tracking code to track  your orders; this is in addition to any Google Analytics eCommerce tracking code you might have in place
• Send them information about order shipments  which means you need to create a new feed that sends the Order number, tracking number and carrier to them on a regular basis
• Send them information about any cancellations which means you need to create another new feed that sends Order number and the cancellation reason to them on a regular basis.
• Add code to display a their badge on the site.

The tracking code is not so hard to implement and a lot of sites are opting to do the new feeds manually especially if their order management processes are not fully integrated with the osCommerce Order Management.  So generally this is not a huge amount of work. Maybe 2-3 hours to implement, verify and patch. Feeds? Maybe a couple more hours.
But there is an  issue if you are already using Google Merchant Center because Google wants to correlate the product data you feed them with the trusted order data that you send.  To do that each product sold has to be directed matched in the feed.  Most people use the osCommerce Product ID to do that.  So what is the issue?  The issue is that when a product has options.
First off in Merchant Center, if the product has options you might need to generate a feed entry for each unique combination assigning it its own “ID”.  This is true for the Apparel industry. If you sell clothes then Google insists you send color /size combinations, where applicable, as individual products in your feed. The ID used for these combinations not only has to be unique but it has to be the same in all data sources i.e your tracking.  Product ID is no longer enough and the actual values WHITE-12 are impractical if not invalid.  So you need to look at using the Attribute  Option Value IDs.  Sounds tricky and it can be if you don’t know what you are doing.  We know so if you need this level of tracking then, rest assured, we can do it.
If you are planning on being a Google Trusted Store then feel free to contact us to find out what you need to do!