Buy on Google is now open and commission-free
blog.google
blog.google
But maybe I just wasn't affected because I don't even look for locally shipped items, as I'd be better off going to B2B-focused niche retail locations in the rough vicinity.
https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/residential-lighting-...
I am a happy customer of this vendor. I bought all the misdescribed hard to find stuff on amazon first... what worked at all failed quickly. The yuji stuff seems a little pricey, but factoring in defect rate it isn't.
Mostly I've purchased 2700k high density strip (now probably several grand worth), but I've also bought a few cases of a19 bulbs and am also very happy with them.
Other than that, I'm happy with a 100 W, 5 m long, 1800 K, 95 CRI strip with a 15~16 kHz PWM dimmer, and my collection of the high-power remote phosphor bulbs and my share of a box of pseudo-filament bulbs. We're looking at bi-color white+white (flexible CCT) strips on top of the cable trays, illuminating the ceiling, for our renovated hacker space.
For reference: YUJI's "normal" "BC" double-phosphor 95 CRI LEDs are about 1 USD/W, sold in packages typically worth 50~150 USD.
If I search for 1440p IPS monitor, it will mix in some monitors that aren't 1440p, and some that aren't IPS.
I'm not sure if it's because they don't want to solve the problem, because they don't care, or because somehow having customers need to spend more time on Amazon to research their purchases perversely leads to people spending more time on Amazon seeing other items they might also later buy.
search bar (on the top) for window-shoppers
selection boxes (on the left) for focus-shoppers
If I select 1440p under Resolution, I do not want non-1440p monitors in search results.
End of the day, search is hard and personal.
I'm not saying Amazon isn't full of dark patterns and other problems but if there is one thing I've noticed on nearly every online store since the dawn of online shopping, it's that there is always the odd product that has been incorrectly classified. This problem only becomes magnified when you allow 3rd parties to complete product pages.
For me though, the most annoying anti-pattern goes to eBay and how it will bulk out it's results with items from other countries even when you specifically state a local region.
note, I have never implemented search but suspect it's hard problem.
Still Amazon's search is pretty awful. I've found adding something in the category I want to my cart gets me better results than being on the item itself. In other words I might search for "wrench" and it shows me 50 items of which 2 are remotely close the the type of wrench I'm looking for. I click one, get new page for that product and below it shows other wrenches but they aren't remotely like the one the page is for. So I add it to my cart and suddenly it suggests a bunch of stuff that is actually close to what I wanted.
I also don't understand the pitching me things I already bought. I get pitching me disposables I already bought. I don't get pitching me a monitor or soldering iron or another mouse or keyboard. I'd think either via statistical analysis or via manual tagging they could figure out what items are more likely to be purchased again and not recommend another PS4 just after I bought a PS4? But who knows. It could be this is harder than it sounds or it could also be they suck at search or haven't gotten around to it yet or ...
Every time it happens I want to quit my job and force them to hire me to fix it.
In reverse, someone looking for a Pixel 3 XL cases but only wrote Pixel 3 cases, would have been much more pissed than you were if it was has specific has you want.
I'm not sure if there's a good workaround for this besides buying from places specializing in the specific types of items you're looking for, which comes with its own set of tradeoffs in price, convenience, etc.
The last few times I bought anything computer related on amazon was just that. Hundreds of entries with bad and probably copy pasted technical data. They would have to vet the data at least randomly and ban problematic sellers to make their search even remotely usable. This is one area where specialized online stores outshine Amazon and it will probably remain that way.
Just a quick example: I saw some nice furniture on Amazon by a brand named Rivet. Turns out this is one of their in-house brands. I wanted to know more about their other products so in one of their listing, I clicked on the brand's hyperlink, expecting to be redirected to the brand's page...
But nope, I landed on a generic search page with, among other things, metal rivet items! Truly mind boggling. So in the end, I had to use Google search to find the actual page.
That's why the title of the products are stupid long with everything crammed in. But yeah, you can find anything on Amazon, the site is basically broken unless you know the exact thing you want, brand, name and all.
It's not even that good at searching books anymore.
You would assume that Amazon allows you to properly slice and dice their product catalog but i think that is something we do but the avg person doesn't.
When i need something and i know exactly what it is, i will search for it on amazon and other retailers to find a good price, most of the time with comparision services.
If i don't now exactly what im looking for i will research the market: What is a common producer/brand, who is known for good quality, what variations exists, what was the model a year before, whats the price difference, whats the feature difference. I don't think thats the normal behaviour.
People like to go to electronic markets to 'browse' and get advice.
I guess by partnering with Shopify they can let someone else worry about that, but likely they'll have a counterfeit problem if this gets any traction.
So effectively while Google is claiming they are "free", the reality is the merchant still has to pay...
https://blog.google/products/shopping/its-now-free-to-sell-o...
https://searchengineland.com/google-offering-upgraded-gmb-pr...
The type of service offered by the $50/month GMB fee is designed to engender consumer confidence. As that Google Guaranteed status starts to propagate, companies showing up without it will start to be at a distinct disadvantage from the ones that do show it in their listings.
Scaling up the enhanced/paid GMB profiles at the same time as announcing the open and commission-free product listings is likely not a coincidence. The product listing change will result an accelerating need to adopt that paid GMB service as a baseline requirement in order to remain competitive.
What to sell stuff via Google, you better be sure that your ads and buy button are at the top, and that will cost you.
If this venue proves reasonably well functioning and promoted, big sellers will have to build their presence there, too, bringing in customers and more credibility.
BTW, when you say, "the buy has no recourse other than a refund if shipping takes longer than it's supposed to", do you imply that shipping via USPS gives you some other, more useful recourse if your shipping takes longer than it's supposed to? I cannot fathom what that would be, unless they're going to, like, refund your shipping and then give you $50 or something.
(Actually, if USPS was going to give me $50 every time they fumbled a package, I would ship everything USPS, always. I would order things I don't need, one shipment at a time. I would retire by the end of next year on my earnings.)
Actually, I've gotten free months of Prime with Amazon easily by just going into support chat and saying more-or-less, "You missed the guaranteed delivery date, I'd like a free month of Prime".
Buy on Google is the new AMP, except now it’s taking over the rest of commerce, not just web publishing.
An alternate model would be to make search good enough let consumers find stores within a radius of their current location selling X, and price compare them. E.g. I need a widget - stores a, b and c are selling it. Store a is $14.99 and 5 miles away, store b is $8.99 and 15 miles away, store c is $11.99 and 20 miles away.
Just search on shopping.google.com and then in the filters on the left side check the box for "Available nearby".
1. Dig something out of your basement that might be worth something; Treadmill, Pokemon Cards, etc.
2. "List" it on Google Shopping
3. USPS picks it up and delivers it
4. PROFIT!Whenever you want to set up a shop and sell over internet, you would reach out to a shipping company and arrange a pickup time for your orders. The company truck visits every day at a specified time, then pick up that days orders for shipping.
To achieve convenience requires either building out a logistics infrastructure on the scale of Amazon, which is clearly a business Google doesn't want to be in, or to approach the problem from the opposite direction. Brick and mortar retail is declining, especially post-pandemic (but also pre); that said, there is already an infrastructure that exists transfers goods to retail locations - it's just spread over 10,000 companies rather than 1. However, if you can write software to better utilize that infrastructure so that you allow consumers to find items that are already physically close to them, and ship using either "last mile" crowdsourcing (and eventually auto-driving vehicles), or at least direct consumers to where the items are so that they can travel less than 30 minutes and get _the_ item they want, then you can come up with a credible anti-Amazon alliance.
Example: I want to buy a sun shade for a pergola. There are probably 10 stores within 20 miles of me that carry them, but I have no idea ahead of time the brands, the price, the color, the size, etc. I could spend an hour calling the stores, and have irritated minimum wage cashiers do inventory searches for me an attempt to answer my questions. Alternately I can go on Amazon, make a purchase, and have it shipped in 2 days from a warehouse 900 miles away from me.
Having something shipped from Amazon, and other non-local webshops means waiting for a few days, or weeks. While ordering from any online store (even the mom and pop retailers) within the country will almost always be next day delivery, and you get to pick between at least two shipping companies.
For selection and availability, pick any local price comparison site, and just order from which ever is cheapest and have the item in stock.
I'm not Amazons biggest fan but Google are the last people on earth I'd want to have my purchase history.
Yeah they look all corporate good with their no commission / seller first attitude but it's just another data harvesting excersize & I'd rather not buy at all than buy through Google for 'free'.
Yes. I saw that while in China. I would get push notifications from Gmail and I was able to know what was the mail about without access to Gmail. But, for Facebook I would only get "You got a message". And that was totally unhelpful. Now, I knew that I had a message that I was not able to access too. Seriously infuriating.
Of topic, but the ProtonMail service just keeps getting better and better. I just tried Hey email for about 5 days, really liked the pretty UI, but it felt good to switch back to ProtonMail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918595 , https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603
I use ProtonMail but most of my email is with people who are on gmail. Oh well.
I know it would be very niche but it would be interesting to see an online store built around Signal, or something similar (assuming a proper privacy policy on not monetizing your data).
I think someone mentioned "burner" cards a while back.
Amazon gives up your purchase history to get it from everyone else, for that sweet product retargeting.
He has embraced the concept:
Our AG is named "Barr" (Pun on a Bar association)
Is there a cool collection of these somewhere? These are the only evidence I feel that we're in a simulation and the engineer is fucking with us.
I wonder if there is some kind of unconscious social bias at work in these cases?
Technically, no. He's head of Commerce, which is different than payments (I'm in payments). You can see from that page, they do things like shopping listings, and the experience around it. Payments (at least at Google) is just a service that teams like that can use. You'll notice that checkout screens for shopping, ads, Youtube, Store, etc... are all very similar. That final payment experience is Payments.
I would assume that the current results indicate that their commissions are either loss making after all the value add services they are providing like customer service/ returns, or the amount they bring in is so small that it isn't worth having them there as a roadblock to adoption.
If it’s free to list, why not just make a special shopping filter on google to find stuff for sale. Amazon included.
I miss the day when I could google for products and find the best price quality. Amazon search shows more ads than search results and the world really needs a shopping google.
I am making an effort to find much smaller online retailers. About 4 months ago I started using VitaCost for some food items, an to be honest their service initially was not great (possibly they were overwhelmed at the beginning of covid-19 lock-down). However, they just kept getting better and better and now I use my shopping history to reorder very quickly. Reading their privacy policy, they do share your purchase history with marketing partners and I can only hope this is on a smaller scale than having Google having my purchase history.
A counter example: my wife and I needed a new coffee pot and I knew the brand I wanted. I went to that company's web site, tried to order, but was referred to Amazon and Walmart Online. Oh well.
Do they sell it? If yes, who buys these and what do the buyers do with it?
Think of a conversion funnel[1]. At each step of a process toward making a purchase, you lose a certain percentage of users. Adding a payment method (typing in your credit card number, address, etc.) is tedious and requires you to have the card handy, so you lose a lot of people at this stage.
If more people are already past the hurdle of having a payment method on file, they can sell more apps/media on the Play store, more devices on the Google Store, more Drive storage upgrades, etc.
--
Getting your product listing to the top of Google search results is not free.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeo_Danaos_et_dona_ferentes
Folks figured that it was like your local heroin dealer: first one's free.
We knew that it would just be a matter of time before ATM fees started showing up.
At first, they weren't bad, but now, it can cost you five bucks to pull out a sawbuck.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...
To those who fear Google will become abusive in the long term: yes they might, but then there will be other competitors (perhaps a reformed Amazon) to hold them to a fair cut in the future.
Market working as intended in other words.
"Google kills products" - HN
99% of the people here would gladly work at Google. But what's the next best thing .. downplay the company you couldn't get into :) Carry on !
- some (all? one?) interview failure (no feedback), rejection
- interviews passed, no degree in CS (which was known to them prior of the interviews), rejection
- interviews passed, this time missing CS degree is not a problem, no cultural fit, rejection
I think I am done. You are assumption is without merit though.
then, imagine them taking it to the next level holding on to your money and not responding . . .
I can certainly sympathesize with that YouTube lady last year who went to YouTube headquarters and starting slinging lead . . . bastards.
But amazon doesn't have a search monopoly, millions of android devices, google maps, or youtube to drive the sales.
Neither do they have the huge amount of data google already have on people.
Now there is a possibility that google fails because sales require a lot of IRL stuff they suck at. So maybe it will be a balanced game.
But if they win, it's going to be a nightmare.
Unrelated, but I'm also quite worried about Apple deciding to become a bank one day.
Don't forget that something like ~70% of their income comes from AWS. They may not be as visible as Google on the net but they are pretty much the largest provider of web services.
If the US had better anti-competitive enforcement I feel like this is akin to the Internet Explorer/Netscape/Microsoft case, in them using one monopoly (search) to take over another market (same hook too: "free").
Plus you know they're going to reward sites for using this in their search rankings (or just outright place them at the top).
However, despite that those sites will get an implicit reward - if users go to these sites, and find a slick easy checkout and low prices, the site will satisfy their need. Google's goal is to put sites that satisfy the users search request at the top.
So, assuming this new Google service is any good, then sites that use it will end up upranked just because those sites satisfy users more than other sites.
That happened in things like Google Reader - users loved the service so much the industry for RSS readers died and stagnated, hurting users...
But, no matter how much faster (or better) your page, you will never, ever, be above, or in the carousel.
How do you consider that "baseless"? It's obvious that Google rewards sites that do things the way it dictates.
Read what you write please.
What I said: You'll get up-ranked, but will always be below the carousel. Therefore being in the carousel is an unfair advantage of AMP.
Google track record is not great in that regards.
People learn from experience and the experiences of others.
Walmart and Target have been trying to chip away at Amazon's lead, and they're only getting buried deeper in the dust. Google doesn't exactly have a reputation for entering new markets and dominating them, either...
Mobile OS's (Android)
Online Video (Youtube)
Online Maps (Google Maps)
Webmail (Gmail)
None recently, granted.
Depends on where you draw the boundaries in markets certainly...
In fact I think it's underrated. It truly changed my world. Earlier I was always nervous when driving and frequently speeding. It's so liberating to be able to call a friend and say "uh I'll be 8 minutes late, sorry".
So yes, they have a huge potential.
They always have sucked doing things IRL, so it's not a certain win. But owning the road to the competition shop is powerful.
Not to mention they can force the hand of small shops: use our API or go down in ranking.
[1] Google it :)
I wouldn't if Amazon was doing a good job. Between the astroturf reviews, fake products and fictional shipping times Amazon leaves a lot to be desired.
But I do agree Google won't be the solution. Google is too hidebound and suspect now to solve this one.
I think the future is in independent online retailers. The good ones will thrive and the rest will vanish, and they aren't going to suffer the FAANGs any more than necessary.
Nothing is free. Ever.
What's changed is you personally know this now. Many still fall for this, and there are always more humans to be scammed.
Bear in mind, most of humanity can't read. Are not really literate. The UN's definition of literacy, is reading at a grade 6 level.
Not how you read in 6th grade, but whatever lets a 6th grader, make it to 7th grade.
Can someone read a stop sign, do not enter sign? That's pretty much 'literate'.
While street smarts exist, bear in mind how many 'stupids' exist...
So yup.. lots of fresh pigeons.