I don't think its that. Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust. But the point is, even with the speed and possible ranking boost, does it boost conversions? More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.
And why is that?
> More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.
You should not be using AMP for e-commerce, at least not for anything but a static product page.
Again, if you try to drive a nail with a hammer and it doesn't work, the fault isn't on the hammer, it's on you.
Because you only get a ranking boost if your page
> contains a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag.
and
> is allowed to be cached in the Google AMP cache
> Google products use the Google AMP Cache
Google products will only mark your page as AMP if you allow it to be included in the Google AMP Cache CDN.
Just look at this example: http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png Notice how the news carousel is completely unrelated, and the pages do not otherwise show up in the search.
Also notice the awesome bug in Google where "Nazi flag" returns "Flag of Germany".
I'll report the flag bug.
Google always ends up putting news from a sailing event from last year in that carousel when I search stuff about my city. Especially awesome in Google News & Weather, where 90% of the news are from last year.
Google seems to just displays the top X search results that happen to be AMP, no matter how old they actually are.
That said, an antitrust complaint was filed with the EU anyway, so we can all just hope your employer is forced to end AMP sooner rather than later, and we can all replace it with a solution that doesn’t rely on any single group’s implementation.
This is the ranking boost mentioned: http://i.imgur.com/KsSmYH8.png
"Top stories" relevant to the search are shown, even if they’d otherwise be on page 10 or worse of the actual search.
Any AMP page can end up there, but only AMP pages. This is a ranking boost.
Original article was about e-commerce. The Top Stories carousel is not relevant to e-commerce since it only contains news articles.
It ranks at #2. With articles that otherwise end up at #14 (just checked).
That’s a 12 place ranking boost. You can’t get that anywhere else.
> Original article was about e-commerce.
You’re competing with ebay, and ebay uses AMP on all pages so that they get the #1 spot with the carousel.
Why would you use an AMP page for that? It was specifically NOT designed for those use cases.
Now back on your point: if the users who have a question are a small % of the total users, why would you have all users load the heavy chat window on mobile devices with limited screen space?