Inside Google’s Plan to Make Ecommerce More ‘Interesting’

Nearly 23 years after it was founded, Google continues to dominate the search engine market with overall share north of 90%. But when you look at product searches, research shows more than half of U.S. consumers use Amazon first instead. This may explain why Google is now on a mission to "democratize ecommerce." As Google kicked off its annual developer conference today, the search giant said recent efforts to improve the shopping experience, such as adding free product listings, are bearing fruit. It has seen a 70% increase in its product catalog and an 80% increase in merchants using the platform. Google also now sees more than 1 billion shopping sessions—activities like conducting image searches or watching unboxing videos—daily. “We're not talking about passive engagement—these are people that are actively querying or searching for a particular product,” said Bill Ready, president of payments, commerce and what Google refers to as NBU, which stands for “next billion users.” Now, with Google I/O as its backdrop, the search giant is out with a slew of updates to enhance what it calls its "retail ecosystem"—and to help vendors get discovered and shoppers find their best matches. Here’s a rundown of what Google is up to. A Knowledge Graph for shopping For starters, Google unveiled its Shopping Graph, or what Ready called “our most comprehensive dataset about products and merchants.” It includes 24 billion listings from “millions of merchants across the web” and seeks to provide shoppers “the most relevant information” about the products they are interested in. Like the Knowledge Graph it debuted in 2012, the Shopping Graph is an “AI-enhanced” model that understands products, sellers, brands, reviews, product information and inventory data. This, Ready said in an interview, helps Google answer shoppers’ questions as it looks for information across those 24 billion listings. That includes whether a given product is available nearby as some retailers send local inventory data directly to the search giant. “It’s great for retailers because it helps consumers understand that they've got the thing that they're looking for," he added, "but it’s also great for the consumer to have much better knowledge of what are the products available in the world around them.” Enhanced visual search functionality Google has also improved its visual search functionality through image recognition technology Google Lens after seeing more than 3 billion monthly searches there. “If you're in the real world and you see an item, you can point your phone at it and Lens will identify what that item is and give you all that rich information from our Shopping Graph—where you can buy it, what are the attributes about that product, what are the things you should know about that product,” Ready said. “All those things come to you just from pointing your camera at a product that you're interested in.” It also allows sellers to “really meet the consumer in that moment of inspiration right as they might have been window shopping or just walking down the street,” he added. In addition, users who take screenshots of products will now get prompts in Google Photos to search with Lens to “do an organic search to bring up matching products for the things that were in their photos,” Ready said. Visual search functionality has been around since at least 2009, but accuracy hasn’t always been top-notch. Ready said, however, that the tie-up with Shopping Graph yields “a very wide range of products” and users “get really good identification of those products,” including “the exact product you're looking at, as well as related items and where you can buy those things.” An expanded Shopify partnership In addition, Google is expanding the partnership it established with ecommerce platform Shopify in 2018. This includes what Google described as a simplified process to enable Shopify’s 1.7 million merchants to feature their inventory on Google properties like Search, Shopping, YouTube and Images. The goal is to "help more merchants get discovered," Ready said. “We're trying to help the consumer understand all the different options they have to buy,” he added. “And so that can be an online marketplace, it can be a large national retailer, it can be the small business down the street, it can be the new direct-to-consumer brand. And it's up to the consumer which one's the best for them.” Cart reminders and loyalty program integrations Lastly, consumers who shop via Google’s Chrome browser will soon see open carts “from the past couple of weeks” when they open new tabs. Shoppers who opt in will also receive offers from merchants. “So not only do you see ‘Here was my shopping cart that I had left at some place,’ if you opt into it, you can also see that a merchant is offering a discount for the thing that was in your shopping cart from three days ago,” Ready said. Customers will also be able to link their loyalty programs to their Google accounts so they will see where they can get discounts within Google Shopping results. ‘Nobody wants to live in a world where there's only one place to buy things’ Why is Google going to all this trouble? As Ready put it, Google is applying its penchant for a free and open web to commerce. This leveling of the playing field is important for small- and medium-sized businesses, he added. “We have a huge opportunity to create a better, more interesting future for ecommerce broadly,” Ready said. On the other hand, ecommerce has been less interesting in the last decade because it was dominated by a small number of players who experienced the majority of the growth, he noted, adding: "Nobody wants to live in a world where there's only one place to buy things." The pandemic demonstrated “there is no one retailer that can serve every need of every consumer,” Ready said. “And so it's really, really important that the broader retail ecosystem has access to great digital commerce experiences and that consumers have access to that choice.” Google Ad Encourages All to Get Vaccinated So We Can Get Back to What We Love