Google Expands Store Ratings to More Countries: Boosting Trust and Customer Experience

Google is extending its Store Ratings feature to English-language shopping searches in Australia, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom, expanding beyond the United States where it was first introduced. This Update allows more merchants to showcase customer feedback directly in search results, helping shoppers make informed decisions and driving more qualified traffic to merchants' websites.

What are Store Ratings?

Store ratings offer a summary of customer feedback about a business, including product quality, shipping speed, customer service, and returns. These ratings can appear in various formats, such as:

Search results (rich results for unpaid listings),
Google Shopping listings,
Google Ads across the Search Network and YouTube.

The ratings include:

A rating out of 5 stars,
The number of reviews a business has received,
Qualifiers like average delivery time (if data is available),
A link to recent reviews.

How Store Ratings Benefit Merchants

Store ratings help build trust by giving potential customers confidence in a business’s service quality, which ultimately leads to more conversions. Displaying store ratings in ads and free listings can also improve performance and increase traffic to merchants’ landing pages. Merchants with a rating of 3.5 stars or higher are eligible to have their ratings displayed in Google Ads, giving them an edge in attracting shoppers.

Where and How Store Ratings Appear

Unpaid Formats (Rich Results and Free Listings): Store ratings can appear alongside rich results and free product listings in Google Search or Google Shopping, displaying both the star rating and number of reviews to help build customer trust.
Ads: Store ratings are displayed next to a merchant’s name in ads, highlighting highly rated businesses. This visibility can lead to increased clicks and conversions.

How to Participate in Store Ratings

Merchants can start participating in store ratings through the Google Customer Reviews program or independent review websites. Google collects post-fulfillment reviews from these sources, which reflect the overall customer experience. Ratings are aggregated and displayed for free, providing businesses an additional channel to showcase positive customer feedback.

To be eligible for store ratings:

Sign up for Google Customer Reviews, a free program managed within Google Merchant Center that collects post-fulfillment feedback from your customers.
Alternatively, gather reviews from one of Google’s supported independent review partners, ensuring your store meets the minimum criteria for ratings visibility.

Important Considerations for Merchants

Reviews Are Not Verified by Google: It’s important to note that Google doesn’t verify reviews. However, they use filters to remove untrustworthy or irrelevant reviews.
Display Conditions: Even if a store has a rating, it might not always appear in ads due to auction dynamics, technical issues like invalid URLs, or insufficient data. Ratings are displayed based on a combination of factors, including the relevance of the information to the user’s search.

Store Insights Panel: A Feature for Enhanced Transparency

In addition to store ratings, Google provides a Store Insights Panel, offering more detailed metrics about a store’s performance, including:

Shipping,
Returns,
Competitive Pricing,
Payment Options.
Website Quality

These metrics, gathered through the Shopping Experience Scorecard, provide shoppers with an even more comprehensive view of a store’s performance, helping them make more informed decisions.

Conclusion

The expansion of Google’s Store Ratings to additional countries gives merchants more opportunities to build trust with their customers and improve their visibility in search results. Whether through free listings or ads, store ratings provide valuable insights into the customer experience, boosting credibility and driving more qualified traffic to online stores. As Google continues to refine this feature, merchants should take advantage of it by actively collecting and managing reviews through Google Customer Reviews or supported review partners.

Also, with the introduction of the Store Insights Panel, shoppers can now evaluate businesses even more thoroughly, further enhancing their shopping experience and confidence in choosing where to purchase.

Merchants in Australia, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom can now benefit from these features, making this the perfect time to start managing and enhancing their store ratings.

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