Watch out, eBay and Amazon. Google is coming for you.
The world’s largest search engine has made it known that it will be aggressively expanding features on its Product Search service in the coming weeks and months in an effort to compete with the likes of Amazon.com and eBay for an even bigger slice of the rapidly growing e-commerce market in the U.S.
Foremost among the upgrades is the quick implementation of image-recognition technology for products, a tool Google picked up when it acquired the shopping search engine Like.com back in August.
The visual search feature is unique to the industry and obviously, one that Google believes it can use to get some separation from other e-commerce competitors. Basically, shoppers can use it to search for items based on colors or other aesthetic attributes, thus widening the net of search parameters that a Google Product Search user can employ as they shop.
Incorporating image-recognition into the online shopping process could prove especially useful for “soft goods” such as clothing, shoes and apparel, an area that Like.com did well enough in to capture the attention of the decision-makers at Google even before they decided to acquire the company.
While soft goods may be one of the most popular product categories out there for consumers, e-commerce entities have historically struggled to convert visits and searches for those items into sales. The reason why is pretty simple. Most, if not all, product search engines don’t recognize certain physical characteristics, subtle or otherwise. As such, it’s hard to comprehensively find and compare soft good items that are of a similar nature.
The technology Google inherited as a result of its acquisition of Like.com changes all that—visual search will display countless items that have shared details and attributes for a shopper all at once.
In addition, when Google bought Like, it also got the rights to Couturious.com, a site that allows users to mix and match soft goods items to create online outfits that they can share with their friends. Google plans to incorporate that feature into its refreshed Product Search offerings as well.
Google has certainly come a long way in its e-commerce efforts, which began back in 2002 with Froogle before the rebranding as Product Search in 2007. Though still outperformed by the likes of Amazon and eBay, Product Search processed more than 226 million searches in the third quarter this year, up 123 percent over Q3 2009. And with e-commerce now a $140 billion a year industry here in the U.S., cutting into the big boys’ share even a little would put some serious coin in Google’s pockets moving forward.
Leave us your thoughts and comments as always.
Google is a large company and they will do whatever they want to do to. We can’t change that.
Yes, agreed. Google needs to make it a level playing field, so that the small businesses can compete.
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I also own a couple of eCommerce sites and have to agree with the above post. With all the changes Google makes it’s hard for the little guy to keep up and compete with the larger guys.
I own a new e-commerce website and I hope to take advantage of all the google has to offer. I am not a fan of amazon but I always use google. Will be good to see how this all works out.
I had been working with three eCommerce sites, seeing this happening right now, I decided to mention this to my clients and can you guess the responses I got from them, everyone wants to jump in and join Google Product Search.
I wish the requirements Google needed for joining in would be fair enough also for small and medium size companies so they will also have the chance of listing their products and services on Googles search engine instead of doing a lot of marketing works just to bring a customer to their shopping cart.
I own a small E-commerce site and I have noticed that it is even more difficult to compete against larger businesses with how Google is catering to them. Selling stocking stuffers on their product feeds now requires manufacture and UPC. Much harder to sell custom goods.
Well I don’t mean to be repetitive but I’m faced with the same situation I own a small e-commerce and organic search is my forte. I also would like to hear any ideas on leveraging Google products Search in regards to PPC integration
I am surprised at how many markets google gets it hands in.. With the google + and now this.
I actually am not a fan of Amazon and eBay, but I do like adwords. So maybe this will be a good change.
I own an eCommerce site and I can tell you that Google is getting too big for what they really are. The other end of the story is that Google now has new requirements for submitting products and its causing more problems for the small guy while the larger ones are doing fine. I retail boat accessories and the competition is crazy but it is completely clear that Google favors the larger sites leaving no room for the smaller ones like mine.
I own a small e-commerce website that gets the majority of our traffic from organic search. Any ideas on how to leverage Google Product Search in regards to PPC integration?