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The company presents an initiative to better compete with Amazon’s e-commerce business.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi
Google takes its festival seriously with Amazon in grocery shopping, just as it did in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019.
But by 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to take over the United States, a preference to create an online grocery shopping market to compete with Amazon has become newer, as retail consumers turn to the Internet to better meet their purchasing needs.
On Thursday, Google announced that it would take steps to bring more distributors and products to its grocery shopping site by cutting sales commissions and allowing stores to use third-party payments and order control like Shopify instead of the company’s own systems. Currently, commissions on Google Shopping range from 5% to 15% depending on the product.
Google is often the starting point for locating data on the Internet, but this is not the case when consumers are looking for a product to buy. More and more consumers in the U.S. first turn to Amazon to locate the products they plan to buy. This has enabled Amazon to expand a rapidly expanding advertising business, which poses a risk to Google’s main money engine.
Google’s seven-year war to take on Amazon has had more minimal than highs. In 2013, it introduced Google Shopping Express, a service that offers same-day deliveries. It submitted $95 annual subscriptions for faster delivery and tried to deliver groceries. Google, however, has given up its efforts.
Google Express has an online shopping center full of major stores like Target and Best Buy. In 2017, it added Walmart to its virtual mall, but the partnership was short-lived. Last year, Google left Google Express for Google Shopping and brought an acquisition yetton to allow shoppers to use credit cards stored with the company to complete the transaction without leaving the search engine.
This year, Google on Bill Ready, a former PayPal executive, will be its trade president and will compete rather with Amazon.
Google announced in April that it would allow anyone to list loose products on its sales site, reversing its previous policy of requiring retailers to purchase an ad for products to appear. The company also announced that those loose lists would be included in its search results. By getting rid of directory load and product promotion, Google aims to make it more exciting for stores to put products in front of the huge search engine user base.
In an interview, Ready said the maximum number of stores was already lagging behind in e-commerce before the pandemic arrived. And as more and more consumers have opted to buy food online in recent months, the gap has widened with much of the expansion of online sales absorbed by a handful of players.
“We need to make sure online sales are simple and inexpensive,” he said.
Adjustments are expected to begin in the United States before being implemented in other countries this year. Google also stated that distributors who had a stock of products indexed on Amazon can simply move them to Google without converting the knowledge format.
While all Google projects obviously aim to disrupt Amazon, Ready did not confront its Seattle rival and refused to speak A even once in a 20-minute discussion. (He even dodged a query about the call of south America’s giant rainforest.)
The closest he was here wasn’t too close.
“Consumers gain advantages from a diverse and extremely rich ecosystem of sellers,” he said. “There is a single player capable of satisfying all the desires of consumers.”
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