)Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog ( If your company runs an ecommerce website, you're probably taking a well deserved break with the end of the holiday rush. But as we move into a new year, it's also a great time to start thinking about how to give your customers an even better online shopping experience. We're also looking forward to an exciting 2011 and to kick things off,

If you're a retailer, you've probably seen the shopping results on Google.com and Google Product Search . These results are generally based on product feeds that retailers submit, for free, to the Google Merchant Center . There are four key benefits for retailers who upload product feeds: Free, Qualified Traffic through Google Product Search , a shopping search engine that helps consumers discover product information,

As the holidays approach, some products are flying off the shelves, and a continuous cycle of sales and promotions means that prices change frequently. Now is a good time to ensure that you're submitting accurate data in your feed, particularly in regards to attributes like "price" and "quantity" which are more variable during the holidays. Otherwise, shoppers might overlook your product offer because of an inaccurate price,

Later this year, we plan to launch Google Shopping*, our shopping search engine, in Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. To participate in this free service, merchants use a site called the Google Merchant Center to submit and track their product data feeds . To give all merchants time to submit their products and be included in Google Shopping when it launches, we have opened the Google Merchant Center for these countries early. Once Google Shopping has launched,