Hacker News Reader

Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

So many questions... the big one: How does Google make money from this?

They can collect the data as usual, and they will, but for once they would not even need to. They can just wait until no shop can make a living without it because they dominate the market. They they start charging.

It's 100% about slowing down Amazon. They want people to search on Google instead of Amazon.

More specifically they want people to search on Google and stay there. Pretty much everyone starts their search on Google.

Lots of people will start with Amazon when shopping. It's definitely a threat to Google because those are some of the most valuable searches.

You mean a lot of Americans will start with Amazon.

Does this encourage or even require putting your credit card on file with Google? If so, that's actually very valuable for increasing sales of everything else Google sells to consumers.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_funnel

You're providing them with market research about inventory, sales, customer demographics, ad click through, etc.... Google isn't doing this for you.

Just curious, what do they do with this data (other than maybe integrating into search)?

Do they sell it? If yes, who buys these and what do the buyers do with it?

A little bit of selling it. A little bit of acquisition guidance. And there are certainly some very obvious ways to monetize once they get enough market share.

Amazon is the only existential threat for Google Search, so Google doesn't exactly need to make money from Shopping as long as it can keep Amazon in check.

You'd still need your product shown on Google. I would assume that this happens via the product feeds and ads. So that you buy directly from the ad.

Getting your product listing to the top of Google search results is not free.

Knowing what you’re buying is hugely useful for improving ads. It provides a ton of information about you, better targeting, retargeting, ad attribution and efficiency metrics, etc

Like everything ads

They will still prioritize paid listings. The only thing that has changed is you can now get on page 51 without paying for the privilege. This just helps them get a slightly bigger marketplace to make their paid listings a little more valuable.

Crossing all your shopping habits with your online profile?

you get searchers away from amazon and into google

Allowing businesses to retarget customers easier?

Ads based on search terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com