For people saying this to calculate the final price with shipping and tax, it's not (or at least not entirely). It is for this new sales conversion dark pattern where prices aren't listed until you add to cart.
> When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation. The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements.
this is what we've seen as well. it validates that whatever price, promo, shipping and taxes you've put into your feed is what ends up in the final checkout and there's no bait-and-switch going on between the feed and reality.
it's rather annoying because it creates dozens of "abandoned" carts per day which we have to continually clear out (based on Google's known ip address ranges) so our reps can go through actual abandoned carts.
This is more likely just a contractual MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) policy by the manufacturer, not a dark pattern that is of the retailer's choosing.
I personally believe that anything that can be automated by software should be automated by software. If it takes programmatically clicking exactly the same A, B, C, D sequence to display what the user wants, that clicking should be done by the machine, not the human.
The modal that pops up is not in the dom until you click the "See details" link, which has target="javascript:;". The "Add to cart" button is an actual link. I wouldn't be surprised if Google just doesn't want to run javascript to extract pricing information if it doesn't necessarily have to.
Ebay sellers are particularly bad offenders: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Open-Box-Certified-Samsung-Galaxy-1...