Google Takes Gloves off in Fight Against Amazon Product Search

So you’re stuck at home during Covid-19 lockdown / shelter and realize you need some board games for the kids to play with. So do go to Google or Amazon. You know Google shows products under the Shopping Tab and yet Amazon has everything as well right? That split second decision is worth hundreds of billions to both companies as they fight for consumers to visit their website to discover, browse, search and ultimately buy.

Up until April 2020, Google allowed product data feeds to be uploaded to their Google Merchant Center and advertised at a cost. These would appear as Sponsored Shopping Ads on Google. Then in January 2020, Google announced that products in some categories (shoes, apparel, accessories) would eligible for display in results on Search and Google Images for FREE. That’s right ‘organic listings’ which they put under a ‘Popular Products’ tab – see below.

popular-products

Why is this a BIG DEAL?

Because Google want the all product brands and manufacturers to upload their products to their Google Merchant Center to fight Amazon, the largest online marketplace in the world. Amazon is able to monetize their traffic not only by taking a percentage transaction fee on each product sold, warehoused and delivered but also on the data collected via their advertising search platform.

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