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Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales
- josefresco 6y agoIMHO this is a significant new "front" in Google's battle for online retail.
- cultus 6y agoI feel like this is more akin to the Ardennes counteroffensive than anything that is likely to work. Google has just failed so utterly at shopping so far. Heck, they've failed at damn near everything they've done in the past decade, and have completely killed off developer goodwill at this point. Amazon is just a much smarter company that seems to outcompete them at every turn.
- ra1n85 6y ago"Google is trying retail now?" was my first thought. "For how long?" was my second thought.
- freehunter 6y agoThey’ve been doing it for 17 years now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping
- solarkraft 6y agoCould they just invert the current scheme by which they shut down businesses?
- bearbin 6y agoThis is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years. Meanwhile, because nobody used the useless shopping search, the homepage search experience has been ruined by the assumption that every search is somebody who wants to buy something. And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed. Google could have fought against that but chose not to in the hope of slightly increased advertising revenue.
- Medicalidiot 6y agoI used to use Google shopping, or whatever it was branded back then, all the time as a second opinion. But its results became convoluted and simply bad. Slowly I drifted away in an unconscious decision until I read your comment and now I remember just how often I used it. Such a shame another Google product was ruined.
- corporateslave5 6y agoBasically all of googles products produce significantly worse value for the consumer so that google can squeeze out extra profits. It’s only a matter of time before they start losing market share
- Icathian 6y agoI would argue that GSuite, Google Drive, and Gmail (the only things I currently pay Google for) all offer pretty excellent value, even at the free tier (for those which have one).
- symplee 6y agoJust for comparison, what percentage of their overall yearly revenue do those three products represent?
- justicezyx 6y agoThat's the point. The ads revenue subsides other products. And that's always Google's argument of upholding that business model. Google claims ads-supported internet is key to retain the free offering.
- acdha 6y agoI used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.
- WaitWaitWha 6y agoDifferent approach to business. For Amazon, the product is the product. For Google, the user is the product. And, as others noted, how long will Google pursue this? It is definitely not a core competency, or business line.
- apahwa 6y agofor Amazon, the user is also the product. everything is a product to Amazon. they have a flourishing advertising business and have extremely valuable and actionable data on all of their users.
- yyyk 6y agoEh, the user is a product on Amazon too. That's why it's nigh-impossible to close an Amazon.com account.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sudo-i 6y agoGoogle dot com UI is growing ever closer to following in the footsteps of iTunes. It’s just becoming a cluttered mess and more confusing to users... I didn’t even know you could shop directly from the site.
- freehunter 6y agoThe worst part is depending on your search all the different options can be in different order or sometimes not even show up. My UI pet peeve is inconsistency and Google has it in spades.
- tantalor 6y agoIt makes sense to change rank of the search mode options depending on your query. Some examples... [supreme court] -> "News" [make face mask at home] -> "Videos" [ps4] -> "Shopping" [cute cat] -> "Images" Google and Bing have the exact same behavior for these queries.
- maxwell 6y agoPersonally I prefer how DDG keeps "All, Images, Videos, News, Maps" static and then shows additional tabs when relevant, e.g. "Shopping" or "Meanings". Jumbling up the tabs on each search was one of the UI-related reasons that I gave up on GSearch years ago (outside of the occasional !g, which now usually feels like being redirected to AliExpress).
- Kuraj 6y agoThis feature is so annoying. It messes with my muscle memory (somehow after all these years I still expect Images to be second) and I end up clicking the wrong thing
- julianozen 6y agoMy mom has gotten stuck in the purchasing interface before and she was confused whether she was buying from google or from best buy, and then all of a sudden she lands up in a different retail experience to check out. She couldn't tell the difference between legit websites and scams (though amazon has this problem too) In an attempt to create a unifying shopping experience, they instead created something that feels fragmented and destroys trust Disclaimer: I am a former AWS and Alexa employees
- mlazos 6y agoGoogle has always been a fascinating company to me. A lot of my friends still work there and love it and my impression of their internal developer experience is that it’s top notch. This shows me though that despite them being an engineer-first company (or used to be) they really haven’t created another dominant business since ads and consumer gsuite. Basically when I was a new grad I thought if your company had technical prowess everything else would follow but I’m slowly learning that it’s not the case, sound strategy is really all you need and you need good leadership for that, which comes and goes.
- toohotatopic 6y agoAre they an engineering-first company though? E.g. the entire XMPP fiasco wouldn't have happened if engineers had made the decision. Which engineer would shut down an open protocol to fight a competitor instead of offering the better product? In the end, they lost the space to Facebook and now Zoom anyway.
- dub 6y agoDid XMPP support seamless conversation history and avoiding duplicate notifications across all of your devices?
- nemothekid 6y agoWhich engineer would shut down an open protocol to fight a competitor instead of offering the better product Probably any engineer that wanted to implement cross device message syncing or end to end encryption without dealing with the politics of 1000s of other companies. Not saying what Google did, but I'm tired of hearing about this XMPP (and/or IRC) pancea when both had non-trivial UX issues.
- majormajor 6y agoOpen != good. "Not Invented Here" doesn't just come about from anticompetitiveness or stubborness, sometimes there are real problems encountered - especially in edge cases or at scale - where trying to fix them through navigating open standards vs making your own thing that works better for you is a really viable option. See also Google's reinvention of things like build tools internally. Lots of open source versions, but they caused plenty of engineering pain of their own.
- MattGaiser 6y agoHow many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn't.
- acdha 6y agoI thought it meant Express since the last time I used Google's shopping service was probably two presidents ago.
- jfim 6y agoSame, which is kind of hilarious since they've actually shut that down about ten months ago [0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in-a-few-weeks-will-become-part-of-google-shopping/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in...
- tgv 6y agoNot me, that's for sure. Then again, I've been avoiding anything that smells like Google for the past 5 years or so.
- Waterluvian 6y agoThey do? I thought they have a "Shopping" search results tab that aggregates store listings. Are they skimming a fee on top of ad revenue for showing those listings?
- opencl 6y agoUp until now merchants had to pay Google to show up in the shopping search results tab at all. So all the shopping results were basically paid ads.
- iamgopal 6y agoWhy it seems that google is always behind one step ? Last time it was ahead of the curve was buying android. And, it doesn't seems like it but google search quality is degrading at alarming rate, for e.g. even when I have allowed tracking my search visited pages, it failed to give me correct results for exact same queries.
- scarface74 6y agoHave you seen the first Android prototypes that looked like knock off Blackberries the year before the iPhone was introduced? Android was definitely not ahead of the curve.
- Barrin92 6y agoit's kind of crazy how much of a one-trick pony Google is. If it weren't for search, which admittedly is very successful I don't know what the company would be worth. Amazon's reach, on the other hand, is pretty astonishing. Cloud, Logistics, e-commerce, and even the media business is huge these days.
- awa 6y agoGoogle has multiple products apart from search with >1B users (Gdrive, android, photos, maps, youtube).
- buboard 6y agoWhich of them is profitable?
- mywittyname 6y agoYouTube is the only product there that can stand on its own. The others are complimentary services that may not generate much revenue independently, but they add tremendous value to an ecosystem of complimentary products. Example, Android allows for traffic data to be sampled in real time, which is then sent to Maps.
- samfisher83 6y agoDoes YouTube generate a profit?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoGoogle doesn't disclose that, but it did say it generates around $15 billion a year in revenue, which ought to pay for a server or two: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
- j749342 6y agowait...google has a shopping service?!
- aatharuv 6y agoDoes anyone know if Google comingles items from various merchants like Amazon does?
- rstupek 6y agoI don't believe you're actually buying the items from Google but through a merchant linked into the program
- aatharuv 6y agoWow, their UI... insists I lived in a city I used to live in years back. There's no way to even just change my city for one search. (I tried changing my address elsewhere, but it just doesn't pick up the change.)
- vincentmarle 6y agoI still can't use Google Wallet to this date because I haven't been able to update my country since 2010
- AnssiH 6y agoHave you tried since 2017? You can nowadays move payments profiles between Google accounts (add the other account as an admin on the profile, then remove the original account from the payments profile), or close payments profiles. My Google Payments settings were incorrectly set as "business" for a long time, but in late 2017 I was able to move the incorrect profile to another Google account and make my main account "individual" (Google prompted to create a new payments profile when the previous one was no longer accessible to the account). Presumably closing the payments profile would have worked as well. https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings
- reggieband 6y agoI wondered if this was Google Express but ... nope, seems like that closed and morphed into something else [1]. I know a lot of people joke about Google shutting down projects or aggregating disparate projects poorly but I actually think it is comical at this point. It makes me think of other recent attempts to coalesce businesses like combining their music subscription services YouTube music premium, YouTube Red and Google Play Music. It just feels like Google keeps squandering its brand. It's like they try to break into a market (e.g. Express for shopping, Hangouts for video chat) and fail to gain sufficient traction so they shut down the attempt only to spin it up again with a new brand. It seems Google's ineptitude at creating successful brands is causing it to continual create bad products. Instead of just sticking with a brand and growing/improving it incrementally over time they throw it away. That leaves them back at square one trying to gain traction with a brand new product with its own set of issues. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in-a-few-weeks-will-become-part-of-google-shopping/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in...
- kentosi 6y agoI honestly thought that Google's shopping tab was a search aggregator into other shopping portals (Amazon, AliExpress, etc) In the same way that Google news isn't actually Google serving the news.
- daun 6y agoI'm not sure Google can compete as much as they'd like in shopping due to antitrust issues. They acquired a price comparison company in 2011 and registered Google Comparison Inc. They shuttered that shortly thereafter. If you look at various Google corporate registrations they've have a few of these shopping and product corporations that went nowhere.
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