All ecommerce merchants that are using Google Shopping, should use the CSS advantages. No matter what your budget might be, CSS is worthwhile for any merchant of any size because of the elimination of Google margin. Our price structure is designed in such a way that you as a retailer can take full advantage of the CSS benefits no matter your budget.
In 2017, Google was sued by the EU Court of Justice for a fine of 2.4 billion euros for antitrust abuse. The reason was that Google had excluded comparison portals from Google Shopping. As a result, Google dissolved its comparison platform on the European market (known as “Google Shopping”) and was henceforth Google Shopping Europe (GSE). With the Comparison Shopping Services Partner Program, Google continued to create the possibility for other price comparison portals such as Smarketer.Shopping to advertise products for retailers via Google Shopping.
A Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) partner is a comparison site: a website that collects prices from different webshops, to steer its visitors to these webshops. Google Shopping (to be found under the ‘Shopping’ tab on the search results page) is actually the Google CSS. To comply with the EU guidelines, Google has disconnected its comparison site and created a separate company. That means that Google Shopping as a separate comparison site is a CSS that advertises shopping adverts on the Google search results page. Other comparison sites can currently also purchase shopping adverts from Google on behalf of webshops. A shopping advert like this looks exactly the same as a shopping advert from Google, but instead of a link with “from Google” there is a link “From [CSS name]”