• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 28, 2023

Paid and organic search professionals spend lots of time trying to keep consumers safe while shopping online. These efforts can impact the bottom line of brands and retailers.

Neeti Deshmukh, product director of Commerce Risk at Google, wrote in a post that the company has several “tools and features in place to make sure you can trust what and who you’re buying from.

Google’s Shopping Graph, a data set of the world’s products and sellers, can quickly review whether a business is legitimate, the products seen are accurate and the content follows the engine’s policies.

Deshmukh on Tuesday shared three ways — vetting stores through automation, store badges, and automated and human merchant and listing reviews — to ensure that online stores meet its standards.

It all starts with merchants and products going through a safety review to confirm legitimacy. The automated vetting process has helped Google efficiently and accurately review a massive-number of products.

In January, Google stopped more than 100 million product offers from serving up on its search engine, and disapproved nearly 300,000 accounts for having quality issues or not following its policies.

Google has a program that identifies quality businesses with store badges and other visual cues point. I never thought much about store badges until recently when a friend bought something online from one of those to-good-to-be-true offers and wished he didn’t.

The store badges are given to businesses on Google that provide a high-quality customer experience. The company also serves ratings for items and sellers to teach shoppers about the experiences with products and businesses.

Google’s systems monitor merchants for violations, and its team of human reviewers keep a close eye on nuances. For example, its systems might notice a merchant was originally selling sweaters now lists household appliances.

Google takes different actions when it identifies unusual behavior, from removing listings that seem suspicious or violate policies to banning a merchant from listing on Google.