Alt-Team's Google Trusted Store

So I've been messing with Alt-Team's Google Trusted Store addon and we are trying to meet all of Google's requirements. We are almost there, but one thing that we were lacking on is out percentage of orders shipped on the estimated ship date.



Alt-Team had:


{$order_info.timestamp|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}



For the ship date. This made it so the ship date was the same time/date as the order date. Sure, this is fine when you can get all of your orders out on the same day, but you are screwed for the weekends.



I'm not sure what the “best” solution is to fix this, but I changed the code to:


{$order_info.timestamp+259200|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}



This basically add 259200 seconds (3 days) to the ship date.



I'm not sure how many people are trying to use Google Trusted Store, but I hope this helps the ones that are.



Thanks,



Brandon

That sounds like asking for trouble. The ship date should be the real ship date. If Google finds a discrepancy like this it can result in your website getting a bad reputation. It's best to ask alt-team to fix this problem.

Actually, we ran this by Google and it is just fine. The way the ship date works is a date that you have to ship the order by. So if a order comes in on January 1 and you have a ship date of 3 days, than the ship date is January 4. Google wants like 90% of your orders shipped by the ship date, so you have to give yourself enough time. Since Alt-Team had it as the ship date was the same as the order date, that was pretty much impossible to meet. Any order on a weekend made our percentages way off.



Google tested everything for us and looked at our shipment feed and said it all is great.



Also, Alt-Team sent me an updated version of this that makes it so there is a setting in the admin to set the amount of days. I'm not sure if they updated their store, but I'll bet they did.



Thanks,



Brandon

Thanks for that info.



However, Google does seem to display the days the store takes to ship and may also use this to rank websites. So if you use a 3 days shipping time, this may negatively affect sales conversion.

[attachment=7037:Google Trusted Stores.png]

Google Trusted Stores.png

Brandon, where did you get the addon? I'm not seeing it on Alt-Team's site. Did they make this for you only?

Well, if the shipment date is too short (1 day) and the order is on the weekend, you can't ship it in time and Google penalizes you for that. If you make it too long, then it might also be a problem. Basically you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. In order to even have your store as a Google Trusted Store, you have to meet their percentages. The only way my client can do this is by having the shipment days be a couple of days out. 3 days is a good number, but I think it would be better if it was 2 days.



We are also getting Shiplark working with this same store. Our hope is that when orders come in, we can process them with Shiplark and generate the shipping label either the same day or the next day and then be able to reduce the shipment days. Right now though, we just want to get him eligible for the program.



As for the addon, yes, it was coded for me / a client. You can see it at Google Trusted Stores configuration though.



Be sure you read Google's requirements carefully though. The big one is that they require at least 500 orders per month. Out of those orders, something like 80 or 90% of them have to be accounted for. This means they either need a tracking number or to be canceled. Then you also have to meet other requirements that I can't remember off the top of my head. If you are a busy store and are good about getting tracking numbers added to people's orders, than you can make this work.



Thanks,



Brandon