I see an interesting battle between Google and Amazon on the horizon. The thing that I’d like to see who will be the king of shopping. Amazon spent the last few years positioning themselves as the dominant force in online commerce and it looks like Google is in the early stages of a serious counterattack. They made two big announcements recently:
1) Google Shopping is becoming a pay-to-play model. What was previously free to merchants will now require participation through Adwords. Mom and pop sites in small margin industries will have a very difficult time absorbing these costs and I think you’ll see shopping results dominated by the big boys or manufacturers selling direct. It’s interesting to note that Google considered paid inclusion to be “evil” at one time (I guess shareholders can deal with evil as long as it’s profitable ). Additionally, a few months ago they also started requiring merchants to provide much more product info in order to participate (brand, model# or UPC, condition, target audience, etc.) This is very similar to what Amazon requires from it’s seller’s, so expect to a head-to-head battle very soon.
2) They announced that Google Trusted Stores will be open to all US merchants. The amount of info they are requiring from merchants in order to participate is staggering. They want merchants to send feeds including order information, tracking numbers, cancellations, etc. This is a lot of private data that I sure don’t want to share with them, but if they are able to get merchants to sign up, they will have a shopping platform that can go head to head with Amazon pretty quickly.
https://support.google.com/trustedstoresmerchant/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2609890&ctx=go
So, think about these two things together. Google will be able to present product listings, reviews, seller ratings and track seller performance (on time shipping, cancellation rate, etc.) just like Amazon does now. The model is a little different in that they won’t be sales platform like Amazon, but it looks like they are hoping to provide a similar user experience. They’re also monetizing a little differently by using a pay-per-click model instead of Amazon’s commission-based model.
Expect to see major changes with how Google presents its shopping listings…it’ll be very interesting to see how this impacts affiliate marketing going forward.
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