Google has found a way to try to compete with Amazon in online commerce by joining retailers in their purchase. For this, it has launched Google Shopping Actions, a new program to create in Google Search a shopping cart to which you can add some of the products that are listed in the search engine.
The program has been announced today by the search engine’s own company, and as they said in Reuters, Google itself will make a profit by charging retailers a part of the purchases made through this new service.
In addition to the Google search engine, this shopping cart can also be used in the Google Express shopping service and Google Assistant. The latter will allow adding products or making purchases not only from the desktop, but also from smartphones or voice devices. All in all, the experience of buying in Google would be very similar to how you can make it from Amazon.
“We have taken a fundamentally different approach from that of Amazon and the like, because we see ourselves as a facilitator of retail,” Daniel Alegre, president of Google for retailers and purchases, told Reuters. “We see ourselves as part of a solution so that retailers can drive better transactions … and get closer to the consumer.”
In this way, instead of competing with Amazon by creating a new online store, what Google wants to do is take the shopping cart to its search engine, and allow instant payments without having to enter any specific store. For now, the list of the first stores that join the initiative includes names such as Target Corp, Walmart Inc, Home Depot Inc, Costco Wholesale Corp and Ulta Beauty Inc.
As we said before, at the moment Google will start to try this new function only in the United States, so that its arrival in other countries will depend largely on how they get this first experiment.
Continue Reading: Bill Gates: “If a robot replaces the work of a human, this robot must pay taxes like a human.”
Google wants its share in online commerce
Currently, when you search for a product at the best price on Google you can see several boxes with the price, but these are only links to different online stores at the end. This means that to make the purchase you have to enter all your data and browse through the purchase process of each store … something that if you already have an Amazon account can make you opt for that store instead of opening an account in another.
But with the new proposal, when you search for a product on Google you could put it directly to a shopping cart of the search engine itself, and make through it the entire purchase process. This process may also occur between several devices, allowing you to continue adding products from Google Assistant on a mobile or smart speaker before proceeding to purchase.
This should greatly speed up the purchase process through Google, encouraging users not to abandon it to complete their purchase. In exchange for facilitating this platform, the stores that use it will give Google a direct percentage of each sale made through the search engine.
At the moment, and always as Daniel Alegre himself has told Reuters, in the first initial tests of this new method the retail partners saw that the average size of the shopping basket of customers increased by 30%, with stores as Ultra Beauty reporting a rise of up to 35% in its online sales.
Google says that in the last two years mobile searches on where to buy products grew by 85%, seeing there an opportunity to try to compete with Amazon in online commerce. In addition, they calculate that voice devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home will be present in 55% of American homes in 2022, so there will be plenty of room to try to take sales through Google Assistant.