Google and Amazon are fighting for dominance between e-commerce and advertising.
Where Google has a monopoly in the search market. Amazon might gain a monopoly in product searches.
In 2020, Google opened its Google Shopping for free to contrast Amazon’s dominance on e-commerce and prevent Amazon from taking more space in the digital advertising industry, the core business for Google.
Yesterday Google dropped one of the most important business announcements of the latest years, which shook the whole digital business industry!
In short, for the first time, in light of the COVID emergency, Google is opening up its Google Shopping Tab to all the merchants who will want to take part.
As highlighted, “we’re advancing our plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google. Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google.”
Source Google: how the Google Shopping tab looks like. It can have a big impact on those retailers able to be featured there. And it’s another move of Google inside another vertical. Where in the last two decades Google worked primarily as search engine sending traffic to other platforms able to give a better experience on those verticals. Yet Google is now making big moves from Travel to e-commerce to control the whole end-to-end experience for users, who in turn get all they need in one place.
Before, you could get featured in the Google Shopping tab only if you paid to be featured there. Instead, right now, Google is enabling everyone to be listed, assuming they know how to rank their products.
So why did Google make this move?
Of course, let’s give Google some credit for helping small businesses.
But beyond that, we know there are several business reasons for that.
Opening up the Google Shopping tab to everyone means a boost in the availability of content with high commercial intent. In short, Google will want to contrast Amazon’s domination.
And for years, Google has been sending free traffic to Amazon just because it lacked a free organic product listing that could compete with that.
Amazon vs. Google traffic comparison, by SimilarWeb. Where Amazon is still small compared to Google in terms of total traffic. Most of the traffic on the platform has a high commercial value (meaning people look for products not information). That means Amazon has still a lot of space to grow and get more of the digital advertising cake, which is Google’s primary businessmodel.
In short, if you hadn’t realized, this is just the next move in the massive war going on between Google and Amazon for world domination!
What’s next?
For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings. If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings, and for new users of Merchant Center, we’ll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.
For Google to be able to funnel its users ad cover the end-to-end journey has become a necessity.
The current business landscape isn’t fragmented as it used to be. Instead, we have a few tech players trying to do it all. In this scenario, those – once startups – have now become the incumbents.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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