Contents7
In short
On Google Shopping, your price shows next to other sellers’: the buyer compares before even clicking.
Merchant Center gives you a benchmark price for your own products, an average of all sellers, but not the seller-by-seller detail.
Tracking sellers and their prices every week, by product and by country, tells you where you are the most expensive, where you can raise a price, and which competitor is undercutting.
Price isn’t everything, and a price war destroys margin: you decide product by product.
A shop window where people compare before clicking
On an ordinary results page, the buyer reads titles and has to click to find a price. On Google Shopping, they see it right away. Google’s help puts it simply: Shopping ads show a photo of the product, a title, a price and the store name, so users get a clear picture of the product before they click.
The direct consequence: when three shops sell the same item, the price gap reads at a glance. A business owner who finds out they are the most expensive by watching sales drop learns it weeks late. The point of this article is to know before.
If your catalogue isn’t clean yet (identifiers, GTINs, declared shipping), start there: that is the subject of our guide to preparing your store for Google Shopping and marketplaces. What follows assumes your products are already live.
What Merchant Center already shows you
Google provides a first tool, the Pricing tab in Merchant Center Analytics, whose BigQuery export still carries the name “Price Competitiveness”. It is useful, and it has blind spots worth knowing before steering your prices with it.
What it shows
For each of your products, a benchmark price calculated from the prices of all merchants selling the same GTIN
The percentage gap between your price and that benchmark
How many of your products are above, at or below it
Filters by brand, category, country, product or price gap
What it doesn’t show
Your competitors’ products that you don’t sell
Each seller’s name and price: only the average appears
A benchmark for a product without a valid GTIN
History in the interface, which only shows the most recent prices
Three details matter. First, the benchmark is a weighted average: according to the documentation of this report’s BigQuery export, it is the click-weighted average price of all merchants advertising the same product, calculated daily and per country. A heavily clicked seller therefore weighs more than a small aggressive one, which the average can hide.
Second, the GTIN is the key to everything: no valid GTIN, no benchmark. A private-label product that only you sell has no other seller to compare against anyway.
Finally, the same page offers sale price suggestions, calculated by Google for merchants who send back their purchase conversions. They only show for products where Google predicts an improvement, and the page states that these predictions don’t guarantee future performance.
Watch out
Data for internal use
Merchant Center help states that this pricing data may not be resold, displayed publicly or pooled across several companies. It is for your decisions, not for communication.
There is also a “Competitors” tab, which places your visibility against other merchants, but at product category level, and without their prices.
What seller tracking adds
An average tells you whether you are above the market. It doesn’t tell you who is overshadowing you. To decide, you need the list of sellers of the same product, with their prices, in each country where you sell: the same item doesn’t have the same competitors or the same prices in France, Belgium or Spain, just as a Google ranking changes from one city to the next.
From a weekly check to a pricing decision
- Record
For each tracked product and each country, the sellers present and their prices, on a fixed day.
- Compare
Your price against the cheapest, the most clicked, and last week.
- Decide
Someone who knows your margins makes the call, product by product.
From the field
We closely follow an online plush toy store, sold in several languages. The same product doesn’t meet the same sellers from one country to another, nor at the same prices: our market-by-market tracking method came out of that observation.
Four decisions this tracking informs
- Spot where you are the most expensive.
Not on average, but product by product and country by country, with the names of the cheaper sellers.
- Raise a price when you can.
A product clearly below other sellers, and selling well, may be leaving margin on the table.
- Pull a product from a campaign.
Paying for clicks on an item where three known sellers show a much lower price often means funding the comparison for others.
- See an undercutting competitor arrive.
A new seller setting up below everyone is spotted in the first week, not at the quarterly review.
The limits: price isn’t everything
Buyers don’t only look at the price tag
Shipping, returns and reviews matter too. Google can show your return policy next to your products when it is published on your site. For reviews, Google requires at least 50 reviews across all your products before showing your ratings in ads, when you send your reviews yourself or through an aggregator. A slightly more expensive seller, delivering faster, with easy returns and good ratings, can win the sale. So the price check is read alongside those elements, never alone.
A price war is paid for in margin
Matching the cheapest at every check is the natural slope, and the most costly one.
Watch out
What a reflex match costs
The arithmetic: a product sold at €50 that leaves you €15 of margin. Lowering it by €5 to match a competitor removes a third of that margin. You then need to sell 50% more volume to keep the same total profit, and the competitor can cut again.
Hence the rule: you decide product by product. Some items exist to attract and can carry a thin margin; others make the profit and must not follow the slide. That choice belongs to your commercial policy, not to a tool.
Where to start
Take your twenty best sellers and your first country. For each, open the Pricing tab in Merchant Center, note the gap with the benchmark, then look the product up on Google Shopping to see who sells cheaper. That sample quickly tells you whether the issue is marginal or weighs on your sales.
When the catalogue has hundreds of references and several countries, this check can’t be done by hand anymore. That is what our Google Shopping by market offer does: sellers and their prices recorded every week, alerts when a competitor changes price, and recommendations you remain free to follow. If it is the store itself that needs rework, catalogue included, that is the role of our e-commerce offer. For listings that sell once the price is right, see also how to write product descriptions with AI without making anything up.
Frequently asked questions
How can I see my competitors’ prices on Google Shopping?
Merchant Center gives you an average benchmark for your own products, by country, without naming sellers. To know each seller and their price, you have to record Google Shopping results product by product: by hand on a sample of best sellers, or automatically across a whole catalogue.
Why doesn’t my product have a benchmark price?
Check its GTIN first: Merchant Center help requires a valid GTIN to get a benchmark price, because that code is how Google matches sellers of the same product. A product that only you sell, under your own brand, has no other seller to compare against either.
Do I always need to be the cheapest?
No. Shipping, returns and reviews also weigh in the buyer’s choice, and systematically matching the cheapest destroys margin without guaranteeing the sale. The goal is to know where you stand on each product, then decide: some items can bear being a little more expensive, others can’t.
How often should I track prices?
Once a week is a good starting point: often enough to see a trend and spot a new entrant, not so often that you react to every daily swing. A very promotional market can justify tighter tracking, limited to the products that matter most to your sales.
Sources
- Google Ads, About Shopping ads (new tab)support.google.com
- Google Merchant Center, About the Pricing tab (new tab)support.google.com
- Google Cloud, Price Competitiveness table (new tab)docs.cloud.google.com
- Google Merchant Center, About competitors (new tab)support.google.com
- Google Merchant Center, appearing in Shopping listings (new tab)support.google.com
- Google Merchant Center, Product ratings eligibility (new tab)support.google.com
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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