A new measure called the Marketplace Fairness Act is currently pending passage by the House of Representatives. It would impact the way many online retailers operate because it would mandate sales tax collection by all retailers that do at least $1 million in sales, where they don’t have a physical presence like stores or distribution centers.

The U.S. Senate recently passed this sales tax legislation in an effort to increase the number of retailers collecting sales tax for online purchases. Many proponents of the Marketplace Fairness Act say that this new legislation will create a more fair marketplace for businesses to compete across both online and offline channels. Conversely, this will leave many retailers with a task of collecting different tax rates across the country as well as integrating with their online shopping carts and accounting processes as many online stores only collect tax in states that they have brick and mortar stores or distribution centers.

We will keep you posted on the status of the pending passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Last year Google introduced Google Shopping, where the search engine migrated their Merchant Center product to a commercial model via Product Listing Ads through AdWords. Last week, Google announced that they are making some changes to the Google Shopping Feed Specification in order to improve the quality of data that merchants provide. Some of the changes include:

• Google support for merchant-defined multipacks, where merchants can sell custom multipacks of one product.

• Google is recommending higher quality images with a minimum size of 800×800 pixels to give shoppers a better visual representation of advertised products.

• The introduction of identifier exists attribute for products like custom goods, vintage items or collectibles that don’t have unique product identifiers.

• Updated and more precise guideline for description and color attributes.

Google says that it will start enforcing the new requirements for new unique product identifiers on July 15, 2013 for merchants within the United States. For all other target countries, enforcement will begin on September 16, 2013. In addition, Google says that non-compliant items may be disapproved and disappear from Google Shopping.

Be sure to keep abreast of the latest product feed changes to ensure that your Google Product Listing Ads do not disappear or lose revenue.

Google has announced that they will be retiring Product Extension ads in late May 2013, which comes after Product Listing Ads were introduced to advertisers last year.

Google says that advertisers have seen better results from their paid model of Product Listing Ads and as a result, they will retire Product Extensions which will no longer be a separate ad extension in AdWords campaigns.

Product Extensions are additions to text ads on a search engine results page that include a small image and pricing of the product the user searched for.

Google recommends that advertisers implement Product Listing Ads in order to capture commerce-related searches and promote products on Google.com and within Google Shopping. In addition, Google has introduced new product feed specifications that merchants must comply with by July 2013.

Advertisers can still implement Sitelinks, Location Extensions, Call Extensions and other ad extensions discussed here.