Google Shopping

Google shopping service has been a stepping stone for millions of online merchants.  It had been a free service for a decade. It provides your products a global exposure; anybody around the globe can view your product by searching it through Google. Yes, it had been free and will not be any more. Google had announced to make this service a commercial one. Previously it was called as Google product search and now will be called as Google Shopping. Now on every sale sellers would pay a share to Google. It really is hurting to all those millions of eMerchants who used to earn millions in sales and did not ever pay a penny to Google but now will pay a huge amount in a total.

This impact could lead to a situation where many eMerchants can step back from this service. If this happens, small new eCommerce businesses would take benefit of that opportunity to shine their shop.  This could be one of the advantages for new businesses and disadvantage for eMerchants. Some other disadvantages that could be faced are, product level bidding by using product attributes like product labels etc. Merchants would have to work hard to get their product listed higher in the product list especially in the presence of giant eCommerce Crocs like Amazon, eBay etc. Also some eVendors might not adopt this as soon as possible hence loosing valuable traffic.

On the other hand a good understanding of such type of bidding will be vital because it won’t be on keywords which had been in place for years, or otherwise could end up in a wasteful effort. As a seller you would have to consistently work on bid optimization.  But this could be the biggest benefit to sellers because products will be promoted based on bid and not on Google’s “relevancy” mechanism which had often been considered as a flaw. According to Google this strategy would benefit users as they would get unbiased results and quality information and will push eVendors to keep their content and products up to date. Regarding placement of Google shopping results, Google has been testing on places where to put these shopping results.  It is expected to show these result on top right section of search page, but nothing has been finalized yet. As an incentive to adopt PLAs (Product Listing Ads), Google will offer two promotions to eMerchants:

1)   $100 AdWords credit for current sellers if they participate in new PLA scheme before August 15, 2012

2)   Receive monthly credit for 10% of the amount they spend on PLAs through the end of 2012

Google’s paid service can be an indication that Google may start making its other top free services as commercial in future, tying a knot around eMerchants.   This could lead to a situation where eCommerce businesses will be controlled by Google.