Death Of The Google Shopping API: Where Can Retailers Turn For Accurate Price Monitoring?

By Dominic Plouffe, CTO, 360pi

The Google Search API for Shopping (GSA) enables anyone to access Google’s considerable database of retail product and price information, and it is currently being used by those in the e-commerce ecosystem for a variety of applications. One popular application is competitive monitoring, wherein retailers monitor the product assortments and pricing of their competitors based on data from GSA. While the data from GSA can be incomplete, error-prone and is very often out of date, the effort required to use GSA is far less than that which would be required to monitor competitor websites directly.

But despite its usefulness, Google announced earlier this year that it would shut down the Google Search API for Shopping on Sept. 16, which means that retailers have only a matter of weeks before Google pulls the plug. Monitoring programs that rely heavily on the Google Shopping API will, effectively, “go dark” at that point.

What can retailers who are relying on GSA in their in-house competitive price intelligence solutions do to prepare for life after GSA? There are three possible alternatives.

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