Google is taking the competition with Amazon for online shopping seriously, just as it did in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019.
But in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to plague the United States, the drive to create an online shopping market to compete with Amazon has taken on a new urgency as consumers avoid stores and turn to the Internet to satisfy plus your purchasing needs.
On Thursday, Google announced that it would take steps to attract more sellers and products to its shopping site by waiving sales commissions and allowing retailers to use third-party order and payment management services like Shopify instead of the delivery systems themselves. the company. Currently, commissions on Google Shopping range from 5 percent to 15 percent depending on the products.
Google is often the starting point for finding information on the Internet, but that is often not the case when consumers search for a product to buy. More consumers in the United States are turning to Amazon first to find products they plan to buy. This has allowed Amazon to build a rapidly growing advertising business, which is a threat to Google’s main financial engine.
Google’s seven-year battle to confront Amazon has had more casualties than higher. In 2013, he started a shopping service called Google Shopping Express, which offers free same-day delivery. He offered $ 95 annual memberships for faster delivery and tried to deliver groceries. Google finally scrapped the efforts.
Google Express became an online mall filled with major retailers like Target and Best Buy. In 2017, it added Walmart to its virtual mall, but the partnership was short-lived. Last year, Google abandoned Google Express for Google Shopping and introduced a purchase button to allow shoppers to use credit cards stored with the company to complete the transaction without leaving the search engine.
This year, Google brought Bill Ready, a former PayPal executive, to be its president of commerce and to compete more successfully with Amazon.
Google announced in April that it would allow anyone to post products for free on its shopping site, reversing its previous policy of requiring sellers to purchase an ad for products to appear. The company also announced that those free listings would appear in its search results. By eliminating the cost of listing and selling products, Google aims to make it more attractive for retailers to put products in front of the huge search engine user base.
In an interview, Mr. Ready said that most retailers were already behind in e-commerce before the pandemic. And as more consumers moved to shop online in recent months, the gap has widened with much of the growth in online sales absorbed by a handful of gamers.
“We want to make sure that selling online is easy and inexpensive,” he said.
The changes are expected to begin immediately in the United States before spreading to other countries later this year. Google also said that sellers who have an inventory of products listed on Amazon can transfer them to Google without changing the data format.
While all of Google’s moves are clearly aimed at upsetting Amazon, Ready did not address his Seattle rival and refused to utter the A word even once in a 20-minute discussion. (He even dodged a question about what the giant rain forest in South America is called.)
The closest he came was not very close.
“Consumers benefit from a diverse and prosperous vendor ecosystem,” he said. “There is no one player who can meet all the needs of consumers.”
