Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-amazon-idUSKCN2231UC

by theBashShell • 6 years ago

126 105 6 years ago

josefresco• 6 years ago

IMHO this is a significant new "front" in Google's battle for online retail.

cultus• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years ago

"Google is trying retail now?" was my first thought.

"For how long?" was my second thought.

freehunter2• 6 years ago

They’ve been doing it for 17 years now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping

bearbin3• 6 years ago

This 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• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years ago

Basically 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• 6 years ago

I 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).

grawprog2• 6 years ago

TIL google has a shopping service. Which is probably part of the problem. I had no idea google even had a shopping service. I don't think i've ever actually clicked the shopping tab before. I vaguely remember when I first noticed it existed, but even when i've been looking specifically to buy something online i've never even thought about using google shopping or even really considered its existence at all until seeing this.

This seems to be kind of a problem with google. I'm usually pretty good at noticing things in software I use, especially changes or added things, except when it comes to google products. I'm still regularly surprised when I learn about or find some feature in a google product i've been using for years or some product that came and went without me ever noticing it was there. Every new thing from them feels like some side project that just gets tacked on to their existing platform without much thought or reasoning until they get bored of having it there.

oefrha• 6 years ago

If you use an ad blocker the shopping results are probably filtered out since they are clearly labeled as “sponsored”. If you don’t it’s really hard to miss the product carousel at the top of search results.

I bet your case is the former.

ummonk• 6 years ago

I must be getting old as a millennial given that I remember the day when it was called “Froogle”.

reaperducer3• 6 years ago

TIL google has a shopping service

TIL Google still has a shopping service.

I used it once. I ordered something very basic from a local department store. Since it was a very common item, I expected it to be shipped from the department store down the street and I'd have it in a few days.

Instead, it was shipped from a city over a thousand miles away and took almost two weeks to arrive.

I went back to Amazon and never looked back.

gen220• 6 years ago

This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay’s model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

From the outside, it seems like Amazon doesn’t spend much time worrying about what Google and Facebook are doing. Not sure if that’s changed recently (Alexa, certain AWS products, Amazon original series).

In general, as companies balloon in size, it’s very hard to draw ROI out of the core product, and these companies tend to bloom into conglomerates (like amazon is, arguably). The biggest mistake you can make, IMO, is when you sacrifice the UX of your core product to benefit these “subsidiaries”, like google has done with shopping infecting search, as others have alluded to.

alephnan• 6 years ago

within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

Most of my cloud experience has been with GCP, but I tried Azure this weekend. I'm not sure how good specific cloud services / products are, but Azure has a much better story on a cloud-first development.

In Azure, I used Visual Studio Online (VScode in the browser). This ran in a VM with command line access. It's integrated with Github, and I imagine other Azure web services will come next, such as a one click deploy button. Microsoft's acquisitions and open-sourcing (Monaco editor, TypeScript) has been so strategic and well-integrated. Amazon acquired Cloud9 but not sure where that went. GCP had a lead with a more feature filled web console which has all the right pieces (SSH emulator/shell), but it seems they squandered the opportunity to make it fully integrated development solution with a Web IDE.

ximeng2• 6 years ago

Story of Amazon vs eBay told by Steve Yegge here: https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...

Scoundreller• 6 years ago

I don’t remember anything about Amazon auctions, but Yahoo had a pretty good auction system, but it never took off.

alasdair_• 6 years ago

This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

In Steve Yegge's post on why he left google: "You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers."

https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr...

Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay’s model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

For more info on "Mr Tooth" and Amazon's quest to compete with eBay, see another Steve Yegge post here: https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...

"So, Life Lesson #2 (and this one is pretty goddamn important) is: Don’t try to beat a network by making a clone with improvements. It ain’t gonna work. There is too much gravitational inertia in the original network; nobody is incentivized to leave it."

lowdose• 6 years ago

Could the biggest difference between Alphabet & Amazon come down to if the actual founder is still commanding the army? Bezos is probably a god within Amazon this could be a serious competitive advantage. I believe Zuckerberg and Musk also enjoy the force of good they have created themselves. I don't really understand why you would quit in such a position.

anoraca• 6 years ago

Target and Walmart are making progress. Amazon Pay and Apple Pay are making progress.

oarabbus_• 6 years ago

And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed.

On the contrary, I'd love to hear more about this.

xyzzyz• 6 years ago

I think a lot of Google "squandering the lead" had to do with concerns about the vertical integration of search to purchase being seen as anticompetitive practice.

Invictus0• 6 years ago

Can anyone recommend a better shopping search engine or price comparison tool?

bearbin3• 6 years ago

Unfortunately there don't really appear to be many good alternatives.

https://pricesearcher.com seems to be a fairly featureful replacement for Pre-2012 Google Shopping/Product Search/Froogle, but it's UK only and I'm not sure about its long-term survival prospects (and it doesn't include eBay listings).

hammock• 6 years ago

A lot (unanimous?) of hate for Google Shopping in here. I actually think it's great. Amazon no longer has the lowest price on all kinds of different goods. So I use Google Shopping tab to price-compare across every possible retailer for, say, a specific rain jacket or a TV. There is some junk but if you mentally filter for online retailers you trust/have heard of, you can get a great deal compared to just running to Amazon sometimes. And the filters/search works reasonably well.

thirdsun• 6 years ago

That depends heavily on where you are located. Here in Germany we have excellent shopping search engines with Geizhals and Idealo.

Particularly Geizhals is an indispensable product research tool since it does a great job of collecting, normalizing and filtering product attributes - it replaces the tedious process of comparing several incomplete spec sheets with different terms, values and units.

ignoramous• 6 years ago

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.

Froogle (est 2002) has continued to exist in one incarnate or the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froogle

Besides, Google has partnered with e-commerce firms in the US (Walmart) and in India to presumably counter Amazon. Walmart and Google are the two largest mobile payment processors in India through PhonePe and Google Pay, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Online_Shopping_Festival

https://economictimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/walmar...

Google has invested and continues to invest in startups, and I'm guessing a few of those must have been strategic investments targeted specifically to counteract that duopoly.

bearbin3• 6 years ago

Froogle (est 2002) and has continued to exist as one incarnate or the other

Indeed, this article is about Froogle (now Google Shopping search) moving back from the change Google made in 2012 to become a paid advertising platform rather than a open-index search engine.

Before they made that change and simultaneously rebranded from Google Product Search to Google Shopping you could make a search there and be fairly sure of finding lots of websites selling what you wanted, and you could compare prices between them easily. But Google didn't get a cut, so now if you repeated the same search, if you get relevant results at all you'll only get the bottom of the barrel shops with inflated prices.

Google certainly has tried to attack Amazon, but the only way they're trying to reduce that duopoly is to insert themselves as a monopoly player! By heavily promoting their advertising platform and pushing deep integrations between merchants and their platform they're forcing out smaller independent shops and marketplaces.

Trying to recreate Amazon, just better, is doomed to failure. The alternative of iterating on their at-the-time working product and extending the usability and visibility of alternative options would have been far better. Amazon's ridiculous 20% fees would get found out soon enough if consumers could actually see a viable alternative.

All that considiered, a better replacement for Paypal integrated with Google and other services is something missing from the world and it's a shame their lack of commitment meant Google Pay hasn't taken off in most places.

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

E-commerce at scale is a lousy margin business. Walmart can’t turn a profit from it. Amazon doesn’t.

If you are Google why would you try and compete with them?

You already have sentiment analysis down as people search your site daily and use android to upload your life photos to their servers for analysis. Then you have Transaction data in their email you can analyze.

I think google is smart to let these other companies slug it out and to play tech partner to struggling brands.

WaitWaitWha• 6 years ago

Different 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• 6 years ago

for 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• 6 years ago

Eh, the user is a product on Amazon too. That's why it's nigh-impossible to close an Amazon.com account.

sudo-i• 6 years ago

Google 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.

freehunter2• 6 years ago

The 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• 6 years ago

It 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.

Kuraj• 6 years ago

This 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• 6 years ago

My 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• 6 years ago

Google 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• 6 years ago

Are 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• 6 years ago

Did XMPP support seamless conversation history and avoiding duplicate notifications across all of your devices?

nemothekid• 6 years ago

Which 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• 6 years ago

Open != 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.

justicezyx3• 6 years ago

The engineering-focused mindset is hilariously short-sighted in hindsight.

When I was AWS 2012-2013, the sense that the Cloud is going to be huge got more and more evidences from customer feedback.

When I joined Google in 2013, the sentiment was that Google can easily beat AWS. But, for all those talks, they have not mentioned any significant understanding on what customers expect from GCP, and why and how GCP can win. The idea was simply that Google's tech (and a self-complacent idea that Google engineers is somehow superior) is just better, therefore it will win. The vast majority of hard work in between was never discussed.

Even later in 2016, I was pitching my Director to build a Cloud service that exposes Borg's experience (I worked at BorgMaster team then); the experience would be close to AWS Fargate (or Cloud Run). And the reply was that its technical complexity would be too high. Once again, there is no thought given to whether or not customers would be loving to use such services. Granted that, I did not have the PM expertise or connections to build a stronger proposal, but the focus on technical thinking is evident.

Infinitesimus• 6 years ago

PM expertise or connections to build a stronger proposal, but the focus on technical thinking is evident

Were you in a PM capacity there? It's a shame you couldn't find someone else who saw the vision of easier developer tooling being made widely available.

hangonhn• 6 years ago

Someone who used to be a Googler once told me: "A group of great engineers lead by a terrible manager will never succeed but a team of mediocre engineers lead by a great manager just might." I don't think anyone doubts Google has great engineers but I don't think it's enough for them to win. All you'll end up with is a lot of great products with no futures. I found myself in a similar situation in my previous job: a bunch of ex-Googlers and a weak leadership team. In the end, we ended up making a lot of components that went nowhere because no one would pay for them.

snarf21• 6 years ago

Most people confuse a goal with a plan. Ideas are easy, execution is really hard.

daxfohl• 6 years ago

The way I see it, Google tends to imagine that they have to handle all the complexity and not leave their users the ability to handle things themselves. They want everything to be a revolution. Google tries to deliver the "one true way" for building things.

What they miss is that users are actually pretty proficient at building things the way they're used to. Even if that way isn't necessarily the most efficient it's what they're good at. And they don't actually need or want a revolution, they just want to plop some existing infra into a hosted datacenter, or spin up some dumb VMs and run some dumb VB app on them.

I work in Azure, and I like to work on cool new things like Google imagines as well. But I have to admit, the vast majority of the money comes from dumb functionality that allows users to lift and shift. This seems to be what Google has a hard time accepting.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

How many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn't.

acdha3• 6 years ago

I thought it meant Express since the last time I used Google's shopping service was probably two presidents ago.

jfim• 6 years ago

Same, 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...

tgv• 6 years ago

Not me, that's for sure. Then again, I've been avoiding anything that smells like Google for the past 5 years or so.

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

They 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• 6 years ago

Up 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• 6 years ago

Why 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• 6 years ago

Have 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• 6 years ago

it'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• 6 years ago

Google has multiple products apart from search with >1B users (Gdrive, android, photos, maps, youtube).

buboard• 6 years ago

Which of them is profitable?

Red_Leaves_Flyy• 6 years ago

Maybe Amazon should hire Google to redesign their search interface and product database so it's useable.

Maybe Google should hire Amazon to redesign the shopping search so it's not a waste of space for a significant amount of time for billions of people daily.

j749342• 6 years ago

wait...google has a shopping service?!

aatharuv2• 6 years ago

Does anyone know if Google comingles items from various merchants like Amazon does?

rstupek• 6 years ago

I don't believe you're actually buying the items from Google but through a merchant linked into the program

aatharuv2• 6 years ago

Wow, 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• 6 years ago

I still can't use Google Wallet to this date because I haven't been able to update my country since 2010

AnssiH• 6 years ago

Have 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

reggieband• 6 years ago

I 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...

ryeights• 6 years ago

Absolutely. The problem is that nobody gets promoted for slowly incrementing on an existing product.

i386• 6 years ago

And every SVP refrag means killing the predecessors initiatives to “make a mark”.

Google are terrible at products

kentosi2• 6 years ago

I 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• 6 years ago

I'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.

Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

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