In late July this year Amazon quit Google Shopping ads. Shortly after, they consolidated their 3 Merchant Center store names into 1. Since then they've had a roughly 30% overall drop in organic Shopping listing visibility - the losses are bigger in some categories than others. Findings are from Audience Key, and they are plugging their new "MerchantPro" tool for tracking Google shopping grid performance. Further analysis by SEJ here.

Bottom line is, if you have an ecommerce website, there could be more opportunity now for your products to gain visibility in organic Shopping listings. Looks like the categories Amazon vanished from the most are apparel, home goods, and laptops.

What's not known is if Amazon is doing an experiment and this is a temporary thing or permanent. Was the drop in organic visibility because Amazon consolidated their GMC stores into 1, or because Google was mad they stopped paying a ton of money for ads, or both, or more things?