New shopping element discovered: "Shop by store" carousels

A new type of organic shopping result is showing up in Google's search results. On a small but steady share of US searches, Google now shows a product carousel that groups products by the store that sells them. Organic product results are usually built around individual products. This one is built around retailers, which makes it a very interesting one to watch.

Google gives this element its own title. In our current data, for example, it appears as "Shop by store" in the US and "Shop by shop" in Australia. These are just a few examples, and Google may change them over time.

If you follow what's happening in Europe, the layout might look familiar. It closely resembles the element Google rolled out in the EEA after the Digital Markets Act, but in our view, it's a much better version for shoppers. This article covers what the Shop by store carousel looks like, how often it appears, how it compares to the EEA variant, and how you can track it in Productrise.

What the Shop by store carousel looks like

This is a Shop by store carousel for a floor register search in the US, with Walmart expanded.

The chart below shows how often product carousels and Shop by store carousels appeared in the United States in September. The US is where we've seen this element most often so far.

What we're seeing in the data

• We first spotted it on September 20. Since then, it has shown up in our US data every day.
• It appears on about one in twenty US queries. The Shop by store carousel shows up on roughly 4% to 6% of our tracked US queries, and that share has stayed fairly stable from day to day.
• It doesn't replace anything. Regular product carousels kept showing up on 80% to 90% of our tracked US queries throughout September. We've never seen more than one Shop by store carousel on the same page, and it appears alongside a Popular products carousel rather than instead of one. So unlike in the EEA, these pages get more product listings, not fewer.
• In Australia, it's called "Shop by shop". Which is a bit weird, right? Either way, it's much rarer there than in the US.
• We haven't found it in the UK. None of the UK product blocks carried either title so far. Many UK blocks come through without a title, though, so we can't rule it out yet.
• It doesn't appear in the EEA. There, a different element has taken over, which we cover below.

How the Shop by store carousel works

The Shop by store carousel shows products, just like a Popular products carousel. The difference is how it organizes them.

• It groups products by store. Each retailer gets its own collapsible row. One row is expanded by default and shows that store's products, followed by a link to visit the store.
• The store sits in the row header. Product cards show a title, price, rating and delivery information, but not the seller. The seller is the store named above the row.
• Rows can show store details. In our example, Lowe's shows its store rating while its row is collapsed. We don't see this for every store.

How it compares to the CSS carousel in the EEA

In the EEA, Google now shows a Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) carousel in place of most product carousels. Its layout is very similar: a list of collapsible and expandable rows, each showing products from one source.

The difference is who that source is. In the Shop by store carousel, each row is a retailer. In the EEA variant, each row is a comparison website.

That difference matters a lot for shoppers. When you click a product in a Shop by store carousel, you're one step away from the product page of the store that sells it. When you click a product in the EEA variant, you land on a comparison website first, which acts as a middleman between you and the seller. We cover how that works in more detail in our article on CSS carousels in the EEA.

How Productrise tracks Shop by store carousels

In raw search data, a Shop by store carousel looks almost the same as a regular product carousel. Both contain a number of product listings with the same three main components: a title, a price and an image. The heading Google puts above the block is what tells them apart. So as of September 29, Productrise stores that heading and shows it for every tracked product. You can read the full update in our changelog.

I recorded a short video that walks through how this works, including the different carousel types we now track.

When you hover a product in the SERP Position Tracker, the tooltip shows the element title. This is what that looks like for a product found in a Shop by store carousel.

Showing the store for each product in a Shop by store carousel is coming soon, so keep an eye on our changelog.

One open question is whether the Shop by store carousel depends on the searcher's location, the way In stores nearby does. We don't know yet. If you want to test it for your own queries, you can track the same query from different cities, as explained in our article on tracking In stores nearby results.

Track Shop by store carousels for your own queries

If you're a US or Australian retailer, it's worth checking whether a Shop by store carousel shows up for your queries, and whether your store is one of the rows in it.

It will also be interesting to see how Google handles third-party sellers on marketplaces. Some platforms host a lot of them. Walmart, for example, has hundreds of third-party sellers, each with their own seller name, as we found in our analysis of Walmart's multiseller strategy in Google Shopping. Will those sellers be able to show up in a row of their own, or will everything be grouped under the platform's name? We'll keep an eye on it.

You can create a free Productrise account and start tracking your queries in any country, no credit card required. Rank tracking is included in the free plan, and you can see what's in the paid plans on our pricing page.

If you also sell in Europe, read our article on CSS carousels in the EEA. The layout is similar, but the change there is far more drastic.