Do you give Shopping data to your competitors?

Since the appearance of several modules for some CMS (Prestashop, Magento, etc.), the increase of product card advertisers o Google Adwords has increased exponentially.

Until recently, generating the data feed "by hand" with all the mandatory attributes (let alone the recommended ones) was nothing short of an odyssey. I still remember calls to the Agency from people who told us that they were carrying more than 3 months trying to advertise in Shopping and had not succeeded in doing so. When the modules arrived everything was different.

For a very low price and performing a very simple configuration (within the reach of anyone) we have the capacity of upload our entire product catalog and advertise quickly. The modules generate a URL which will be the one we will use in Google Merchant for program the daily upload of items and, thus, ensure that we always have updated prices, products, etc..

So far so good ! But it turns out that if you look closely, the URLs that are generated always have the same structure. Thus we can find URLs of the type: https://www.tiendadelcliente.com/gmerchantcenter.com/gmerchantcenter.en.shop1.xml o: https://www.tiendadelcliente.com/gmerchantcenter.es.xml or also: https://www.tiendadelcliente.com/googleshopping-en.xml

When we realized this we quickly did a test by replacing the URL domain with those of the competition. And what we imagined happened..... eureka ! ..... all the articles, links to images, prices, etc. appeared on the screen as if by magic.  Unbelievable? True!!!! You can do the test.

It is only necessary to replacing the domains by those of the different ecommerce companies that appear in the search results of Google Shopping in the URLs that I indicated above. The best of all is that, in some occasions, we can even find the product stock so that with a simple calculation in excel pe would like to know the products sold each day as well as their turnover.. ¿How can we solve this? 

Mainly in two ways: We can ask the site developer to change the URL structure so that it is difficult to identify. It could be something like this https://www.tiendadelcliente.com/googleshopping-es25689542589.xml. On the other hand, we can protect the URL with a "username" and "password"..

When this step is done, it will be necessary to indicate it in the configuration menu of the Google Merchant feed. To summarize, protecting the URL we upload to Google Merchant will give us a lot of peace of mind and now .... run and start spying on your competition !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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