Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Google Shopping is free, so it's definitely worth a try. You submit your product feeds through Google Base. That being said, depending on the competitiveness of your product category, you will want to optimize your feed.

One of the reasons I'm interested in Google Shopping is that it is free. My IT department thinks it will be more hassle than it's worth to register. So, I'm hoping someone has a success story I can use to urge them to go ahead with the registration.

Sorry I don't have a more definitive answer, but I've had success pushing about 30 products manually. We had very little changes in the pricing (once a month or so) and little if any product additions or subtractions. So was it worth the initial upfront setup of about 4-5 hours and monthly maintenance of 2-3 hours...absolutely. It didn't drive a lot of traffic, but did convert at a high rate as you're reaching the right people and the right time - most of the traffic does come from the product results one-box in the Google web search results, which means you really need to get a high ranking through feed optimization and have a competitive price.

As I suggest with any new channel - test! If possible, do some keyword research to see which products have a high search volume and manually submit a few of those products that also generally convert well. If that works, then you should be able to convince IT to create the automated product feed into Google Base.

Hope this helps!