SEO News You Can Use: John Smith is the Cart Abandoner of Your eCommerce Nightmares

Google confirmed Googlebots are adding products to shopping carts on eCommerce sites to verify the price provided by merchants matches the price at checkout. Using the moniker John Smith, Google is filling up carts and then abandoning them. The result: even more abandoned shopping carts — the nightmare of all online retailers. 

Abandoned shopping carts are considered among the biggest challenges that eCommerce retailers need to overcome. Add this to the challenge of understanding consumer behavioral data and, now, Google’s price-check activities. 

With many brands moving their operations into the online space because of the recent COVID-19 shutdowns, the eCommerce industry is growing at an unprecedented rate. If you’re new to the eCommerce game, understanding Google is paramount to achieve online success. Google’s Merchant Center Terms of Service indicates all sellers agree to grant Google access to crawl and check pages for any violation. So, while finding an increase in mysteriously abandoned shopping carts on your website could leave you feeling demotivated, note that Google is acting in line with its Google Merchant/Shopping policies. 

If you hope to participate in Google Shopping or want your products to show up across Google platforms, you can’t block Google from performing site checks. However, you can slow the rate of crawling by fixing your robots.txt file. The search engine uses Googlebot and Googlebot-image to crawl merchant sites. By fixing your robots.txt file, you allow Google to crawl only the provided landing pages. Here’s what Google says about controlling crawling.

Google is aware it’s causing a ruckus with online retailers. It has confirmed it’s looking to streamline its automated systems and will work with the participants of its shopping programs to address ongoing issues. The best outcome is online retailers can begin to identify Google’s price-checking actions across eCommerce sites, then apply a filter in analytics to remove these “abandoned shopping carts” from the data. For now, if you see a sudden increase in your abandoned carts metrics you can possibly blame it on John Smith a.k.a. Google.

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