Mountain View, California — Just in time for the busy holiday shopping season, global search engine giant Google aims to shine a spotlight on high-quality online stores to help shoppers find ones that offer compelling shopping experiences. The company’s Commerce team early this week announced the launch of Trusted Stores, a new scheme to help consumers identify quality retailers.
Acting on complaints from consumers who say they are wary of buying goods from online stores they have never frequented, but to assuage doubts about the legitimacy of the e-commerce sites, the company introduced a new e-commerce-related pilot program intended at helping shoppers recognize online vendors that offer a “great shopping experiences” whom they can trust to improve shopping for consumers–and collect more data on merchants.
As the announcement explains, the Trusted Stores awards a special badge to e-commerce sites that “demonstrate a track record of on-time shipping and excellent customer service,” and is also presenting up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection for eligible purchases from Google Trusted Stores.
“The Google Trusted Store badge is awarded to e-commerce sites that proves a track record of on-time shipping and excellent customer service,” says Tom Fallows, a Group Product Manager on Google’s Commerce team. “When visiting a qualifying store, shoppers can hover over the Google Trusted Store badge and see metrics on the store’s shipping and customer service performance.”
“When a shopper makes a purchase via a Google Trusted Store, they have the option to select free purchase protection from Google,” says Fallows.
Eligible problems include the following:
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You fail to receive the correct item;
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Your item is not in the promised condition;
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You are billed an incorrect amount;
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Your item is not shipped in a timely manner;
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The Merchant does not honor their return policies.
“Then, if a problem crops up with the purchase, Google will act as a mediator between the two parties to resolve the issue.” Also, as a token of gift, Google offers up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection for eligible purchases.
Moreover, Google is payment-service agnostic: shoppers can pay for their order with a credit card, debit card, PayPal, BillMeLater, Amazon Payments, eBillMe, or Google Checkout. Orders purchased with any other method, including but not limited to, cash, check, purchase order, gift card, house credit, or wire transfer are not eligible for the Program.
Additionally, in order to continue displaying the badge, merchants must ship a high percentage of orders within the delay period stipulated at purchase and must maintain a low average for shipping time. Google has not disclosed specific threshold numbers for the program.
Google, however, emphasizes that this protection does not represents a product warranty or endorsement and does not falls into a form of insurance–a disclaimer probably designed to avoid regulation under consumer protection laws. The company describes its dispute resolution process on its website.
The search engine titan has started admitting merchants into the program, which will require participating sites to share shipping and customer service data with Google and to meet Google’s shipping and customer service standards.
Merchants participating in the Google Trusted Stores pilot program include O.co, Wayfair, BabyAge.com, and Beach Audio. Google says that program badges may appear intermittently on these sites in order to test whether the program promotes shopping, as intended.
Google expects to admit more merchants into the program at a later date. Those interested can sign up online.
Google is clearly bolstering its commerce efforts. Certainly, there is a lot of money to be made in online shopping, and Google increasingly wants to be at the warm, fuzzy center of that experience for consumers, to whom it may serve more retail-related ads.
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