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Perhaps if Google had not gotten greedy and made google shopping pay-to-play they would have had a shot at it. Pay-to-play hurts consumers a lot because the se
by TrevorJ 12y ago
Perhaps if Google had not gotten greedy and made google shopping pay-to-play they would have had a shot at it.
Pay-to-play hurts consumers a lot because the search results are tainted by it, and it hurts adoption because google is double dipping with it's own CPC customers.
- sounds 12y agoThat's a great point. I came to ask whether it is likely Google will be improving their product search? As someone who remembers all the way back to Froogle, I still find myself on product search, obsessively checking amazon, google, ali express, ebay, etc. to try to find the best prices and to find competing products. Most often, that leads me to Asia. [Yes, I'm a geek, so most days I'm looking for consumer electronics.] I don't know but that Google is just as concerned with Alibaba's recent IPO, and Amazon is just a convenient whipping boy. As a side note, no, I still don't really take ebay listings seriously. Ebay and Paypal are still so seller-hostile that I just use them for research and then try to buy somewhere else.
- pinkyand 12y ago> to try to find the best prices and to find competing products. Most often, that leads me to Asia. The problem with the Chinese goods is that it's very hard to locate high quality goods. The review systems are useless(full of junk) , and there's little reliable data about quality in english. So amazon becomes the default.
- TrevorJ 12y agoIt's no longer truly product search. It's simply a catalogue of ads that have been paid for.
- Animats 12y agoEven worse, now that Google itself is a retailer, merchants are paying Google to advertise against Google. I wouldn't be surprised if, soon, Google Shopping simply becomes Google's own product catalog.
- vidarh 12y agoConsider that Amazon lets external merchants buy ad space on their pages, as well as pit their own sales against Amazon marketplace sellers.
- wutbrodo 12y agoGoogle Shopping was absolute garbage before they started charging; sellers just dumped random crap on there and didn't bother updating it because there was barely any incentive to. For the user, it's the difference between: 1) having a wasteland of outdated, incomplete and inaccurate information or 2) having a browsable set of ads. In the latter case, you're aware there's money behind the placement, but it's still far more useful than Google trying their best to do organic search over a corpus that's complete crap.
- TrevorJ 12y agoI agree that it was garbage before, but it's worse now. I searched for every variation of "cannon 60D" I could think of today and didn't get one hit. Anecdotal evidence at best, but the point is, Google's business model with google shopping is not setting them up to be a meaningful competitor to Amazon whatsoever. I agree they needed to do something but turning google shopping into a competitor with Google's own CPC service seems like a poor idea all around.
- wutbrodo 12y agoI also agree that it's still not particularly great, but I have noticed a pretty substantial improvement in quality. The fundamental problem here is that retail is a huge, huge mess. With exceptions for innovators like Walmart, most stores don't know what they have on their shelves, when they're out of stock, when something is purchased...it's absolutely absurd. The quality of the data is simply never going to be as good as Amazon's, charging for product listing ads is one of the way that Google is trying to nudge incentives towards higher quality data.