Google is making it free for retailers to sell on Google

Google is now losing billions of revenue each year because of Amazon. Even though Google is not in the e-commerce business in a big way like Amazon, it competes with Amazon for ad dollars. Until a few years ago, most of the consumers were searching for products they want to buy on Google. From Google search results page, they navigate to different shopping websites like Amazon. By placing ads in the search results page, Google makes billions of revenue through product search queries. Because of Amazon’s dominance in shopping, many consumers now go directly to Amazon to search for products, bypassing Google altogether. As a result, in the recent years, Amazon is reporting billions in search ad revenue. In order to better compete with Amazon, Google today made a major announcement.

Google is making it free for merchants to sell on Google. From next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will have free product listings. Even if a retailer is not advertising on Google, they can list their products for free.

• For retailers, they can get free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping searches.
• For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab.
• For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings.

Google is rolling out this change in the U.S. before the end of April and it will be expanded globally before the end of the year. Google today also announced partnership with PayPal to allow merchants to link their accounts. Google is also working with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce to help retailers manage their products and inventory.

Source: Google