Business @ BrandonGreenlee.com

We have been using Google Checkout for our stores almost since its inception. Like many others we have accumulated a great deal of customer reviews of our stores inside of Google Checkout. As they were so positive, I obviously wanted to have these displayed on our site. The ratings are very well done and like most legitimate testimonials, can have a very positive impact on wary buyers.

Unfortunately, Google only allows the merchant to access these reviews. I’ll repeat this again to reiterate its ridiculousness: Google Checkout doesn’t allow the public to see your Merchant Reviews, much less have them available on your website in front of potential buyers.

There is one way to get access to ratings publicly, however, it won’t by itself solve the issue of getting the information on your site. Google Product Search is an extension of the ever unpopular Google Base made specifically for merchants to list products for sale. The unique thing is that Google Product Search displays Google Checkout Reviews. For the sake of example let’s say you search for retailers selling eeePC’s.

 

What do you find? Nothing other than your site and its corresponding Google Checkout Customer Reviews.

It’s time to get listed in Google Product Search. To this you need to register your Google Checkout account with Google Base. Once registered, upload a product (something that your store actually sells). Make sure you have registered this item as a product. Do a thorough job describing your product as well as including all fields Google recommends you include. In order to make the jump from Google Base to Google Product search, your item must be manually approved by Google- make sure it’s done right. The upload/feed process itself can sometimes be flaky, if it doesn’t seem to take within the first 3 or 4 days, then delete and try again.

Eventually, your item will be listed in Google Base. Several days (probably a week) after being listed in Base you should receive approval for Google Product Search. Viewing your public reviews looks something like this:

Now, you have publicly accessible reviews, however Google does not provide a way for you to show these to potential customers that have accessed your site via other means than Product Search. To this I put together a little Photoshop image and linked it directly to the Product Search Checkout Reviews. The cid being replaced by your sites cid. I also put the sort as 2, displaying reviews by descending rating.

Now just put the logo on your site:

 

Note: I am not affiliated with the sites linked to or displayed.

Update 1: It seems that Google Changes your author id from time to time. This won’t cause your old link to stop working, it simply will not show your newest reviews. About once a month do a Google Product Search for your own products and see if your link is the same as the one you are using on your website.

Update 2: Google has now reverted to my original author ID. I’m not quite sure why or when these changes are happening. However, as I said before just check the url you are using versus the product search one regularly.