This doesn't seem to solve the main problem I have with Amazon: even when I know exactly what I want, it's impossible to find. Amazon hides the thing you want behind the items they want you to buy instead, and they allow fakes and spammers to flourish. They never have the right aspects in their search filters, either. Looks like Google is the same way. I can't find an A19 LED light bulb with 2700K color temperature and CRI 90 or better. I'm going to have a much better experience in an actual store.
They may have changed it, but a few years back I did product feeds to Amazon and had to read the documentation. Basically Amazon will only search the title of the product page, nothing else.
That's why the title of the products are stupid long with everything crammed in. But yeah, you can find anything on Amazon, the site is basically broken unless you know the exact thing you want, brand, name and all.
It's not even that good at searching books anymore.
If I search for Pixel 3 case on Amazon, it will also return Pixel 3 XL cases.
If I search for 1440p IPS monitor, it will mix in some monitors that aren't 1440p, and some that aren't IPS.
I'm not sure if it's because they don't want to solve the problem, because they don't care, or because somehow having customers need to spend more time on Amazon to research their purchases perversely leads to people spending more time on Amazon seeing other items they might also later buy.
Another possibility is search is hard. If all they returned is things with "Pixel 3" well, that includes "Pixel 3 XL". Ok so they look for exact string "Pixel 3". Now nothing matches like "Red Pixel 3 Case"
note, I have never implemented search but suspect it's hard problem.
Still Amazon's search is pretty awful. I've found adding something in the category I want to my cart gets me better results than being on the item itself. In other words I might search for "wrench" and it shows me 50 items of which 2 are remotely close the the type of wrench I'm looking for. I click one, get new page for that product and below it shows other wrenches but they aren't remotely like the one the page is for. So I add it to my cart and suddenly it suggests a bunch of stuff that is actually close to what I wanted.
I also don't understand the pitching me things I already bought. I get pitching me disposables I already bought. I don't get pitching me a monitor or soldering iron or another mouse or keyboard. I'd think either via statistical analysis or via manual tagging they could figure out what items are more likely to be purchased again and not recommend another PS4 just after I bought a PS4? But who knows. It could be this is harder than it sounds or it could also be they suck at search or haven't gotten around to it yet or ...
Pretty sure that Amazon search is bad on purpose... For a while they didnt even allow you to sort search results unless you selected a category (some products can be in multiple or wrong categories so you ended up hiding good results if you selected a category).
There is a 3rd possibility: sellers are completing the product page with incorrect metadata. This might even be down to simple user error eg someone non-technical given the data entry job.
I'm not saying Amazon isn't full of dark patterns and other problems but if there is one thing I've noticed on nearly every online store since the dawn of online shopping, it's that there is always the odd product that has been incorrectly classified. This problem only becomes magnified when you allow 3rd parties to complete product pages.
For me though, the most annoying anti-pattern goes to eBay and how it will bulk out it's results with items from other countries even when you specifically state a local region.
Presumably their data shows them that if they mix in some monitors that aren't 1440p or aren't IPS that customers still sometimes buy those monitors anyway. From Amazon's perspective the search functionality is more of a product discovery functionality. If they only showed what the customer was searching for they would miss out on sales to people who didn't start out with a clear idea of what they wanted.
The biggest problem with the selection boxes (when they do appear) is the garbage data. In this scenario, you'd get something like "1440p" "1440 pixels" and "1.4KP", sorted nowhere near each other.
Audible does this thing where when I search for an author, it constructs a bag of words based on the titles of books that show up for that author, then retrieve based on that bag of words, then rank by like popularity of the returned books. So if a different, more popular author has written books with similar titles (which is very easy given a trilogy with storm-themed titles) you will occasionally see a book by the wrong author as the number one result.
Every time it happens I want to quit my job and force them to hire me to fix it.
Yea i've seen this many times with price comparison engines, i even used to work for one and was head of search back then. We had to actually "tune/down-weight" phone accessories vs phones. Ppl typing in "iphones" wants "iphones". Ppl typing in iphone cases wants "iphone cases". The rudimentary problem is both of the text tokens are in the titles and are popular products. "precision vs recall vs popularity/sorting". We had a similar but lesser problem with books (the titles are so vast and ambiguous). Lol you get a book called 'iphone'. The leading ecomm platform in my country (s.a) has this book problem in search results and mm-tokens still. Looking at you T..A..L ;).
> If I search for Pixel 3 case on Amazon, it will also return Pixel 3 XL cases.
In reverse, someone looking for a Pixel 3 XL cases but only wrote Pixel 3 cases, would have been much more pissed than you were if it was has specific has you want.
I've noticed a trend lately where items will "ship from the US" with an estimated 2-3 day delivery date only to be delayed at the sender, eventually "ship" a month later, and arrive with international postage a few days afterward. I'd love to filter that kind of crap out as well, but I'm not sure how Amazon could go about actually implementing it.
That's happening on Aliexpress and other places too - I've wondered about this. An aliexpress seller said ships from US, arrives within a 5 days or free, then 1.5 months later it finally arrives and they get dispute overturned because it was delivered. So pathetic. The stupid postage gives away their "shipped from US" game.
Read the fine print, and launch the dispute right away. Oh, and look at the seller's reputation/history.
But maybe I just wasn't affected because I don't even look for locally shipped items, as I'd be better off going to B2B-focused niche retail locations in the rough vicinity.
There's a difference between listing it and being able to filter it in the search results. I'd like to remove Alibaba that gets blended in, essentially.
Amazon's search engine is pure garbage and for a company this size, and with their status, it's quite embarrassing.
Just a quick example: I saw some nice furniture on Amazon by a brand named Rivet. Turns out this is one of their in-house brands. I wanted to know more about their other products so in one of their listing, I clicked on the brand's hyperlink, expecting to be redirected to the brand's page...
But nope, I landed on a generic search page with, among other things, metal rivet items! Truly mind boggling. So in the end, I had to use Google search to find the actual page.
From having spoken to people who worked on object clustering for Froogle in the past, I think the base issue is that it's surprisingly hard to extract all the metadata accurately from descriptions. Even if you provide an file format and allow merchants to upload all their item descriptions with structured data, you'll still just end up getting bad data from a lot of merchants, and then you have the problem of whether you want to accept the inaccurate data provided by the merchant who has an incentive to misstate things, or the inaccurate data provided by your flawed automatic text extraction systems.
I'm not sure if there's a good workaround for this besides buying from places specializing in the specific types of items you're looking for, which comes with its own set of tradeoffs in price, convenience, etc.
> you'll still just end up getting bad data from a lot of merchants,
The last few times I bought anything computer related on amazon was just that. Hundreds of entries with bad and probably copy pasted technical data. They would have to vet the data at least randomly and ban problematic sellers to make their search even remotely usable. This is one area where specialized online stores outshine Amazon and it will probably remain that way.
I am a happy customer of this vendor. I bought all the misdescribed hard to find stuff on amazon first... what worked at all failed quickly. The yuji stuff seems a little pricey, but factoring in defect rate it isn't.
Mostly I've purchased 2700k high density strip (now probably several grand worth), but I've also bought a few cases of a19 bulbs and am also very happy with them.
I can confirm. The one time I had some of the LEDs die is when I tried to hack a fan-less 150 W LED desk lamp together form 9W COBs thermal-epoxied to a trade fare showpiece from a Chinese streetlight/factory-downlight company, that they used for 200 W. But I had it upside-down and without a heat spreader layer, which I blame the LED's death on.
Other than that, I'm happy with a 100 W, 5 m long, 1800 K, 95 CRI strip with a 15~16 kHz PWM dimmer, and my collection of the high-power remote phosphor bulbs and my share of a box of pseudo-filament bulbs. We're looking at bi-color white+white (flexible CCT) strips on top of the cable trays, illuminating the ceiling, for our renovated hacker space.
For reference: YUJI's "normal" "BC" double-phosphor 95 CRI LEDs are about 1 USD/W, sold in packages typically worth 50~150 USD.
You would assume that Amazon allows you to properly slice and dice their product catalog but i think that is something we do but the avg person doesn't.
When i need something and i know exactly what it is, i will search for it on amazon and other retailers to find a good price, most of the time with comparision services.
If i don't now exactly what im looking for i will research the market: What is a common producer/brand, who is known for good quality, what variations exists, what was the model a year before, whats the price difference, whats the feature difference. I don't think thats the normal behaviour.
People like to go to electronic markets to 'browse' and get advice.
I used to like buying with Google Checkout back in the day. And does anyone remember Froogle? They used to have free product listings, and then they started charging. One of the reasons I heard for that change was that they were getting a lot of spam.
I guess by partnering with Shopify they can let someone else worry about that, but likely they'll have a counterfeit problem if this gets any traction.
"We're not saying you have to pay us $50/month, but what will potential customers think if your business isn't Google Guaranteed while all your competitors are..."
Absolutely! I didn't intend to give the impression they weren't providing a service for that fee, but meant it in relation to skybrian's comment about "what else you need to set up and how much they charge".
The type of service offered by the $50/month GMB fee is designed to engender consumer confidence. As that Google Guaranteed status starts to propagate, companies showing up without it will start to be at a distinct disadvantage from the ones that do show it in their listings.
Scaling up the enhanced/paid GMB profiles at the same time as announcing the open and commission-free product listings is likely not a coincidence. The product listing change will result an accelerating need to adopt that paid GMB service as a baseline requirement in order to remain competitive.
This is 'The Anti-Amazon Alliance' as Ben Thompson puts it. Curious to see if customers will adopt it. I think it lacks two key value props of Amazon: uniform guarantees (Amazon guarantees regardless of seller) and super fast shipping.
Super-Fast shipping is available now to everyone now via USPS Priority Mail 3 day. It's 3 days at most and unlike Amazon the delivery time is guaranteed. Amazon's shipping time estimates aren't trustworthy enough to rely on for important deadlines, the buyer has no recourse other than a refund if shipping takes longer than it's supposed to.
FWIW I would never trust USPS to deliver on time in my city. They regularly lose packages for a week or two before magically delivering them, with tracking information that is the long-form equivalent of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. UPS, FedEx, and Amazon have all been vastly more reliable than USPS. However, USPS has been fine for me in other cities. Maybe, like real estate and cell phone coverage, location matters when it comes to package delivery.
BTW, when you say, "the buy has no recourse other than a refund if shipping takes longer than it's supposed to", do you imply that shipping via USPS gives you some other, more useful recourse if your shipping takes longer than it's supposed to? I cannot fathom what that would be, unless they're going to, like, refund your shipping and then give you $50 or something.
(Actually, if USPS was going to give me $50 every time they fumbled a package, I would ship everything USPS, always. I would order things I don't need, one shipment at a time. I would retire by the end of next year on my earnings.)
OK, so that's the same refund of shipping fees you get from Amazon if they're late, right?
Actually, I've gotten free months of Prime with Amazon easily by just going into support chat and saying more-or-less, "You missed the guaranteed delivery date, I'd like a free month of Prime".
Of you are big enough, you want to be present on all large trading venues, say, both Amazon and eBay.
If this venue proves reasonably well functioning and promoted, big sellers will have to build their presence there, too, bringing in customers and more credibility.
It may depend on the value-proposition for the sellers. If Amazon takes too much of a cut, alternatives, even with fewer customers, may look attractive.
Will probably do nothing at least for now .. Google had the reputation to cut things that didn't grow as fast as it wants to, I don't even know for sure if Google Cloud will still exist in 2030.
Has anybody seen the UX? It’s very deceptive. I went to a local business listing and tapped on Menu, expecting to see a deep link to their site. Instead it shows a Buy On Google page with hosted menu. It was hard to leave that page; my browser history could only start over the search since it was an SPA of a local listing.
Buy on Google is the new AMP, except now it’s taking over the rest of commerce, not just web publishing.
They need to solve shipping. Partner with Uber (or hey, Waymo) to pick up and drop off packages from shops to consumers.
An alternate model would be to make search good enough let consumers find stores within a radius of their current location selling X, and price compare them. E.g. I need a widget - stores a, b and c are selling it. Store a is $14.99 and 5 miles away, store b is $8.99 and 15 miles away, store c is $11.99 and 20 miles away.
They need to partner with the US Postal Service and the USPS needs to become the primary delivery method for this type of retail. The USPS has the advantage of already visiting every reltail location 6 days a week for mail delivery. As far as society as a whole is concerned, adding additional postal workers to the workforce is a lot better than adding more temporary gig workers.
I think this is a great idea. In fact, I would like to see Google partner with things like Craigslist or FB Marketplace to list items from anyone and then use USPS to ship them. It would be like the worlds largest yard sale.
1. Dig something out of your basement that might be worth something; Treadmill, Pokemon Cards, etc.
2. "List" it on Google Shopping
3. USPS picks it up and delivers it
4. PROFIT!
I think for some products on shopping.google.com you can already search within your area. I think it it does not work with all products though I know I have seen it on some. Like electronics at Best Buy.
Just search on shopping.google.com and then in the filters on the left side check the box for "Available nearby".
"Solve shipping"... Shipping packages is a solved problem in many countries. You order something, before the shipping company picks up the orders for today at the sell, anywhere from 17:00 to 22:00. It shows up at your door the next day or a pickup point of your choosing.
To truly compete with Amazon, they need convenience. Buying packages from mom&pop retailers to ship can yield anywhere from 1 day to 3 week delivery times. Aside from a strong anti-Amazon conviction, where's the motivation for consumers to do that?
To achieve convenience requires either building out a logistics infrastructure on the scale of Amazon, which is clearly a business Google doesn't want to be in, or to approach the problem from the opposite direction. Brick and mortar retail is declining, especially post-pandemic (but also pre); that said, there is already an infrastructure that exists transfers goods to retail locations - it's just spread over 10,000 companies rather than 1. However, if you can write software to better utilize that infrastructure so that you allow consumers to find items that are already physically close to them, and ship using either "last mile" crowdsourcing (and eventually auto-driving vehicles), or at least direct consumers to where the items are so that they can travel less than 30 minutes and get _the_ item they want, then you can come up with a credible anti-Amazon alliance.
Example: I want to buy a sun shade for a pergola. There are probably 10 stores within 20 miles of me that carry them, but I have no idea ahead of time the brands, the price, the color, the size, etc. I could spend an hour calling the stores, and have irritated minimum wage cashiers do inventory searches for me an attempt to answer my questions. Alternately I can go on Amazon, make a purchase, and have it shipped in 2 days from a warehouse 900 miles away from me.
The US, and other large countries, may be the special case in this situation.
Having something shipped from Amazon, and other non-local webshops means waiting for a few days, or weeks. While ordering from any online store (even the mom and pop retailers) within the country will almost always be next day delivery, and you get to pick between at least two shipping companies.
For selection and availability, pick any local price comparison site, and just order from which ever is cheapest and have the item in stock.
This is how it works in the countries that I lived. Every order that placed before 14:00 or 17:00 (based on the shop/site) would be shipped the same day, others would be shipped next day.
Whenever you want to set up a shop and sell over internet, you would reach out to a shipping company and arrange a pickup time for your orders. The company truck visits every day at a specified time, then pick up that days orders for shipping.
Sounds noble but if google are at the helm then that's the opposite of what I want.
I'm not Amazons biggest fan but Google are the last people on earth I'd want to have my purchase history.
Yeah they look all corporate good with their no commission / seller first attitude but it's just another data harvesting excersize & I'd rather not buy at all than buy through Google for 'free'.
I noticed Amazon has stopped informing you what you actually purchased in their confirmation emails (though the emails still have other purchase suggestions in them). I'm guessing that might be partially to prevent the info from being conveyed to Google in Gmail.
> I can almost guarantee it's to get you to click back into the store for re-engagement.
Yes. I saw that while in China. I would get push notifications from Gmail and I was able to know what was the mail about without access to Gmail. But, for Facebook I would only get "You got a message". And that was totally unhelpful. Now, I knew that I had a message that I was not able to access too. Seriously infuriating.
Precisely why I don't use Gmail. I know that most people I correspond with use Gmail, so it's somewhat pointless, but at least my use of Protonmail adds some friction to the system when I use it for buying stuff.
I feel the same way. I am happy to do little things to push back on surveillance capitalism.
Of topic, but the ProtonMail service just keeps getting better and better. I just tried Hey email for about 5 days, really liked the pretty UI, but it felt good to switch back to ProtonMail.
I use ProtonMail but most of my email is with people who are on gmail. Oh well.
I know it would be very niche but it would be interesting to see an online store built around Signal, or something similar (assuming a proper privacy policy on not monetizing your data).
That would be cool for donations too. I often would like to compensate software devs or content creators, but I hate having to create an account and/or share credit card info.
I think someone mentioned "burner" cards a while back.
But you still need stuff to be delivered, which means they have your name and address, along with contact information, which can be used to match your purchase history,
If I was Amazon I wouldn't be selling purchase history to Google. Why would I ? I have no need of the money and Google is one of the few entities that present a visible threat to my well being.
Armand Hammer wasn't the CEO, just a minority shareholder and board member. He wanted to buy the company because he liked the name and apparently already used an arm and hammer as his personal insignia. (Fun fact: His grandson is Armie Hammer, the actor, who was named after him.)
I notice that in my home state, the head of more than one auto dealership had the same last name as the brand of car sold by the dealership, for reasons that were coincidences.
I wonder if there is some kind of unconscious social bias at work in these cases?
If your name matches a brand of a car it might be rational to sell that brand; assuming it's otherwise a completely arbitrary choice, it probably helps name recognition and memory, since some customers will probably mention it as a mildly interesting anecdote to their friends and family.
Technically, no. He's head of Commerce, which is different than payments (I'm in payments). You can see from that page, they do things like shopping listings, and the experience around it. Payments (at least at Google) is just a service that teams like that can use. You'll notice that checkout screens for shopping, ads, Youtube, Store, etc... are all very similar. That final payment experience is Payments.
Selling on Google has gone through a lot of iterations for them now as nothing seems to end up working out how they want. They are unsure whether they should just advertise products, or if they are selling whether they should handle shipping, customer support, returns, seller reputation/reviews, payment processing and making money from fees or just as a play to keep people on Google and away from Amazon. At various times they have scaled up with real employees to try and drive the service and work with merchants, at others they have stuffed the whole process behind contact forms and Indian first level support.
I would assume that the current results indicate that their commissions are either loss making after all the value add services they are providing like customer service/ returns, or the amount they bring in is so small that it isn't worth having them there as a roadblock to adoption.
If it’s free to list, why not just make a special shopping filter on google to find stuff for sale. Amazon included.
I miss the day when I could google for products and find the best price quality. Amazon search shows more ads than search results and the world really needs a shopping google.
The author Douglas Rushkoff ("Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus," etc.) has a lot of good things to say about the long term dangers of relying on huge retailers like Amazon (and now apparently Google).
I am making an effort to find much smaller online retailers. About 4 months ago I started using VitaCost for some food items, an to be honest their service initially was not great (possibly they were overwhelmed at the beginning of covid-19 lock-down). However, they just kept getting better and better and now I use my shopping history to reorder very quickly. Reading their privacy policy, they do share your purchase history with marketing partners and I can only hope this is on a smaller scale than having Google having my purchase history.
A counter example: my wife and I needed a new coffee pot and I knew the brand I wanted. I went to that company's web site, tried to order, but was referred to Amazon and Walmart Online. Oh well.
They can collect the data as usual, and they will, but for once they would not even need to. They can just wait until no shop can make a living without it because they dominate the market. They they start charging.
Does this encourage or even require putting your credit card on file with Google? If so, that's actually very valuable for increasing sales of everything else Google sells to consumers.
Think of a conversion funnel[1]. At each step of a process toward making a purchase, you lose a certain percentage of users. Adding a payment method (typing in your credit card number, address, etc.) is tedious and requires you to have the card handy, so you lose a lot of people at this stage.
If more people are already past the hurdle of having a payment method on file, they can sell more apps/media on the Play store, more devices on the Google Store, more Drive storage upgrades, etc.
A little bit of selling it. A little bit of acquisition guidance. And there are certainly some very obvious ways to monetize once they get enough market share.
Amazon is the only existential threat for Google Search, so Google doesn't exactly need to make money from Shopping as long as it can keep Amazon in check.
Knowing what you’re buying is hugely useful for improving ads. It provides a ton of information about you, better targeting, retargeting, ad attribution and efficiency metrics, etc
They will still prioritize paid listings. The only thing that has changed is you can now get on page 51 without paying for the privilege. This just helps them get a slightly bigger marketplace to make their paid listings a little more valuable.
I doubt this will make a dent to Amazon's monopoly. Amazon is not winning because of they're closed and have high commission.
If somebody can compete with Amazon will be companies like JD, coupang, Walmart.
EU bank cards will mostly allow free withdrawals across Europe (with some strange exceptions). Some countries like Belgium have fully prohibited national banks from charging customers of rival banks. It's not a technical/financial issue, it's a policy choice...
Regulation only says it must be the same price as at your own bank. If you have a cheap bank at home you have it in the whole Euro zone. If you have poor bank competetion in your home country and pay more you have the same issue when traveling in the Euro zone.
I have 3 cards that don't cost me a Euro cent. 1 is debit, 1 is de facto debit because the credit limit is nominal so I cannot spend money that I don't have in my account. The 3rd one requires me to pay the bill 2 weeks after its issued to avoid (high) interest. But they are all free if used correctly.
Why would they be free? Before the ATM we had to go to the bank Friday afternoon or Saturday morning (9-12 only) to get money after pay day. If you couldn't wait in the big-ass line, or if you just had something else to do, then you just didn't have any money! It was ridiculous! The ATM brought revolutionary convenience. You could get twenty bucks at 11pm if you wanted to.
I actually almost never use ATMs, anymore (I use Apple Pay, as much as possible, and plastic, for the rare times it is not accepted). I've had the same five-dollar bill in my wallet for a month. The place that I tended to use ATMs, was when I went to Tokyo, and they are definitely not free, there.
I haven’t paid for an ATM except when traveling internationally. The major banks screw you but if you pick a credit union or a few banks like TD Bank it’s easy to avoid.
What i need a price_parity for amazon and my local country south africa. I agree.its mostly import duties by my misguided government.(we dont make cpus, why tax them ?). Im thinking the next n
big thing in online shopping is getting the global-village-catalogue at my doorstep with a reasonable shipping price, ppl in America dont know how lucky you are to have free shipping. We can pay 2x the price in dollars just for shipping.
Well, this is a good shot across the bows for Amazon. I feel Amazon was getting a bit abusive towards its sellers.
To those who fear Google will become abusive in the long term: yes they might, but then there will be other competitors (perhaps a reformed Amazon) to hold them to a fair cut in the future.
Does anybody else think this is in response to Apple's privacy crackdown on third party tracking data? If you buy on Buy, then you are still first party for Google and they can still get your signals.
Google's e-commerce had been floundering for years, I'm glad they brought in fresh leadership and upped investment to keep Amazon from having a near-monopoly. Customers will benefit.
This is what happens when you kill third party cookies. The signals have tremendous value, so networks will move them into first party activities . Expect further consolidation
Not going to happen. The company with one of the worst customer support vs the most customer centric. Maybe some dont care, but I know a lot that prefer Amazon over any other Shop because of the service.
Slashdot.org was plagued by people posting "first post" to every story, so they implemented an automatic "first post" comment to each article, that was removed as soon as other comments appeared. Maybe this comment ("Google will shut this down like so many other products") should be similarly posted automatically to Hacker News on every Google story?
Could add the same logic for the inevitable "self host it" when Github is down, or the "but we did it first!" comment from Gitlab whenever Github announces a feature.
Perhaps this listing service would get more goodwill from users and business if they were to pay sellers a commission when a listed item sells. Google's extractive (no, it's actually not 'free') business model has become quite tiresome, and they seem to have wasted their first-mover advantage over the past decade.
Alternatively Google could just grow a spine and stop reinventing the same app year after year. The worst part is that they go all pikachu face when people react with wtf.
I’d agree on angular but for most the others including hangouts the problem is that it isn’t just an update - it’s an entirely new app/service. Meet isnt superseding hangouts - google is killing hangouts and offering a new app in its place. Can you imagine if Apple killed off iMessage, didn’t offer a way for people to transfer data and then just offered half the functionality to people in a new app? Google is an absolute shitshow these days.
Google isn’t trying new things they are re-releasing the same apps with less functionality while simultaneously killing off user bases. This isn’t some esoteric engineer criticism - it’s mainstream at this point.
Commission free until Google get's traction and then all kinds of bullshit rules and games, and ZERO customer support . . . would you really trust the same people who just arbitrarily cut off peoples gmail accounts and such, and you have ZERO ability to contact them and sort it out ?
then, imagine them taking it to the next level holding on to your money and not responding . . .
I can certainly sympathesize with that YouTube lady last year who went to YouTube headquarters and starting slinging lead . . . bastards.
You really think Google -- who has floundered in this space for years -- is going to dominate a market that is already dominated by a company (Amazon) with a 50% larger market cap?
Walmart and Target have been trying to chip away at Amazon's lead, and they're only getting buried deeper in the dust. Google doesn't exactly have a reputation for entering new markets and dominating them, either...
That's wrong. There was a study [1] on this exactly that found that most people (in the US I think) who search products start with Amazon and not Google. In one of the recent Amazon earning reports, they reported $10B advertisement revenue, which is another indication that direct product search on Amazon is huge.
Actually Google is getting shittier and crappier every day. Btw. I usually look for things on Amazon, they search engine has the same issue as Google's. Only spam (they call it ad) in the first N positions. I would seriously pay for a service which has no PII data collection (still can measure the effectiveness of your engine), no ads and relevant results.
Is that still true? For most products Amazon search seems much improved to me, it used to be quite poor. Plus on mobile people may be biased to search via the app.
Most people don't even know what an URL is. They can't tell the difference between an app and a website. They think google is the internet. Hell, even the ones that do know better type the site URL into google to go to the site they want.
Google Maps is very much real life. And it was very easy to mess up. Big usability achievement.
In fact I think it's underrated. It truly changed my world. Earlier I was always nervous when driving and frequently speeding. It's so liberating to be able to call a friend and say "uh I'll be 8 minutes late, sorry".
Gmail was internal. Maps was mostly built by a couple acquisitions, but it wasn't anything like Youtube, where the acquired companies were big established players in the space.
> already dominated by a company (Amazon) with a 50% larger market cap?
I wouldn't if Amazon was doing a good job. Between the astroturf reviews, fake products and fictional shipping times Amazon leaves a lot to be desired.
But I do agree Google won't be the solution. Google is too hidebound and suspect now to solve this one.
I think the future is in independent online retailers. The good ones will thrive and the rest will vanish, and they aren't going to suffer the FAANGs any more than necessary.
Or wipe out the low commission fee competition in the payment processor space.
If the US had better anti-competitive enforcement I feel like this is akin to the Internet Explorer/Netscape/Microsoft case, in them using one monopoly (search) to take over another market (same hook too: "free").
Plus you know they're going to reward sites for using this in their search rankings (or just outright place them at the top).
I think reward, but it is pretty cunning, the rewarded sites get better placement so better profit so it will be easy for others to see how google outperforms to other solutions.
Look like they aren't doing payment processing. They're partnering with Paypal and Shopify. So by "commission-free" that would mean the commission on top of payment processing?
Love how baseless allegations like "reward in search rankings" are heeded here. If I write something egregious without a source against Duck Duck Go I'd be downvoted to oblivion
Google is pretty strict about not artificially rewarding sites in the organic rankings. (ie. non-ads and non-infoboxes).
However, despite that those sites will get an implicit reward - if users go to these sites, and find a slick easy checkout and low prices, the site will satisfy their need. Google's goal is to put sites that satisfy the users search request at the top.
So, assuming this new Google service is any good, then sites that use it will end up upranked just because those sites satisfy users more than other sites.
Intuitively I don't like the idea of Google controlling everything but based on the reason you gave it sounds like this would be a good idea right? Customers get a better experience in the end.
Yes, although it ignores 2ndary effects (eg. Google takes over payments market, all other competitors go bankrupt, Google stops innovating because no competition, users lose out because no innovation).
That happened in things like Google Reader - users loved the service so much the industry for RSS readers died and stagnated, hurting users...
What is happening with AMP ? The pages load faster. They made it clear they will reward page load times in ranking. They have made no such shopping related claim here.
Implement AMP and get rewarded with a carousel position (ie. better rankings). Implement a faster-than-amp experience using plain HTML+CSS and get... at worst: nothing. At best: you'll get up-ranked slightly.
But, no matter how much faster (or better) your page, you will never, ever, be above, or in the carousel.
How do you consider that "baseless"? It's obvious that Google rewards sites that do things the way it dictates.
> But amazon doesn't have a search monopoly, millions of android devices, google maps, or youtube to drive the sales.
Don't forget that something like ~70% of their income comes from AWS. They may not be as visible as Google on the net but they are pretty much the largest provider of web services.
Well... "free" has been used like this for thousands of years. Traders/merchants spouting free this or that, like a car dealer giving free oil changes, or midas with a free inspection.
Nothing is free. Ever.
What's changed is you personally know this now. Many still fall for this, and there are always more humans to be scammed.
Bear in mind, most of humanity can't read. Are not really literate. The UN's definition of literacy, is reading at a grade 6 level.
Not how you read in 6th grade, but whatever lets a 6th grader, make it to 7th grade.
Can someone read a stop sign, do not enter sign? That's pretty much 'literate'.
While street smarts exist, bear in mind how many 'stupids' exist...
