For Google, Checking Out Is Hard To Do: The End of Google Shopping

It looks like Google has finally admitted the inevitable: the goal of Google is to get you off Google, and not to get you to transact on Google.

The whole idea never really worked.

First, any ads-based platform has the same problem with retail as everyone else: it's a low-margin business. While retail companies can add advertising and greatly expand their margins, advertising companies have a hard time dedicating resources and real estate to inventory that could be better monetized through high-margin ads.

Social media has it slightly better than search engines -- at least you stay on a social media site. Most people spend their days there. Despite your search intent, your behavioral intent on Google is to go somewhere else. Virtually every experiment to keep visitors on Google longer has failed, perhaps except for Gmail (innovation) and phones (acquisition).

Google has had a rough history with shopping.

In 2006, Google launched a "Google Checkout" service which allowed merchants to pay with Google on their website (sound familiar?) with the hook that advertisers would get a Google Checkout badge.

That didn't work - integrating with websites took a lot of work, and even back then, consumers had Paypal.

Google launched Google Shopping Express (later termed Google Express) in 2013, a marketplace that keeps consumers on Google. That didn't work either, even as it tried to sign up retail partners.

Google's Shopping marketplace was a big focus of the previous President of eCommerce Bill Ready at Google, even looking to drop commission fees to zero.

That didn't work either, and now the last vestiges of that program are finally dead. And good riddance, I don't expect it to return soon.

Anyone who has run a website for more than 5 minutes understands that the source of traffic matters. If a visitor comes to your website from Pinterest, it's different from someone who comes to you from a Google ad, versus someone who comes to you from a lower-funnel organic blog article.

This brings me to the main point of people building marketplaces who have traffic: intent matters.

No amount of AI, personalization, or incentives can help the visitor in that session. What should you do instead?

Cater to the needs of that visit. Build trust for that visitor with proven products. Build more direct usage instead the same way Amazon did -- by leveraging your repeat customers and gradually broaden their purchase history.

The challenge with building any marketplace is not the technology. Thanks to the hard work of Mirakl and others, anyone can buy marketplace technology.

The more complex parts are:

* Being relevant to your buyers (convenience, selection)

* Achieving the goals of your suppliers (new buyers, incremental sales)

* Keeping product and delivery quality high (performance)

* Merchandising products well, in a coherent way (relevance)