GOOGLE SHOPPING FOR THE WIN!

By: Rami Odeh

This article appeared on the April 29th on Velocity Commerce Group.

Amidst the current situation in the world, with people staying at home, Google has accelerated its plans of making Google Shopping more available to the masses as of April 27th. In the past, Google shopping was a pay-to-play platform, where business’ would have to pay a fee in order for their products to be live in Google shopping’s search results. Now this has all changed. Google identified an immediate need in the marketplace; more and more people are buying online, and many businesses are not able to reach their customers online. By making Google shopping free, this will help bridge the gap of small businesses online.

Google still plans to charge for special featured placements, but regardless, free regular placements into shopping.google.com is going to be a win for businesses, small and big alike.

In various recent consumer shopping reports, we are seeing droves of customers shopping online in categories, that were previously deemed to fall into the in-store purchase group. Something else is happening, customers are comparing in-stock rates, price, and availability across different platforms. In recent months, Target, and Walmart have seen record sales on their .com platforms, as well as branded direct to consumer websites. Google Shopping, in our opinion, will eventually become the go to place to compare multiple products across multiple websites. It is true that the big players like eBay, Walmart, and Amazon will benefit by having their products on Google Shopping, as well as small businesses that otherwise may not have a budget to list on Google Shopping. I think the biggest winner here is Google, as they corral products among different retailers, and begin to drive more customers to start their shopping experiences on shopping.google.com.

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