Google CSS: The History and How E-commerce Retailers Benefit from Switching CSS Partners

The search engine giant Google plays a pivotal role for e-commerce businesses today. Google's marketing options through search, shopping, and YouTube are powerful tools for companies to reach customers when they are already searching for what the businesses are selling.

We at Acsser are Google CSS Partners and, therefore, in this article, want to delve deep into the history of the CSS program. Why does it exist, and what are the reasons for e-commerce companies to switch CSS providers?

What is Google CSS?

CSS, which stands for Comparison Shopping Services, are price comparison pages for products. The core of these platforms is to provide features that allow customers to compare products from multiple e-commerce retailers to find the option that best suits the customer. In the context of Google advertising, however, these platforms are a necessary tool to promote their products and reach potential customers through Google Shopping.

Simply put:
1. Google searches through e-commerce retailers' products via Merchant Center and determines which products should be displayed for each search.
2. The most relevant products and companies bid through Google Ads to appear first.
3. The companies that win the bidding get to display their products first. These companies' CSS providers showcase the products as ads and place them at the top of Google's feed. 

We at Acsser also have a comprehensive in-depth guide on what Google CSS is and its benefits HERE!

The History Behind: The European Commission's Pressure

In June 2017, the European Commission ruled that Google should pay a fine of 2.42 billion euros for violating EU competition laws through its Google Shopping service. Google was accused of abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own price comparison shopping service in its search results. The EU argued that this market dominance hindered fair competition and gave Google an unfair advantage over other e-commerce platforms.

To address this, Google was forced to open up to other price comparison providers to deliver ads on Google's shopping service, paving the way for the emergence of Comparison Shopping Services (CSS).

The EU allowed other price comparison sites to deliver ads on Google's feed. This structured Google under a new kind of partnership. Price comparison sites are still required to undergo a series of tests to be accepted into Google's partnership and handle e-commerce companies' advertising. One such Google CSS partner is, for example, Acsser. 

Why should you switch Google CSS providers?

What many e-commerce companies may not be aware of is that when they first create their Google Ads account, they are automatically linked to Google's own CSS service.

What even fewer are aware of is that we CSS partners can charge e-commerce companies however we want. Google does this through its CSS service directly via advertising. Google's method for doing this is to add a 20% cost to each bid that e-commerce companies win. 

This means that all e-commerce companies using Google's own CSS service are indirectly wasting 20% of their budget. 

Switch CSS provider to Acsser!