Google Takes Aim at Amazon. Again. (nytimes.com) 41
Google is getting serious about competing with Amazon in online shopping -- just like it did in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. The New York Times: But in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grip America, the push to create an online shopping marketplace to compete with Amazon has taken on new urgency as consumers are avoiding stores and turning to the internet to fill more of their shopping needs. On Thursday, Google announced that it would take steps to bring more sellers and products onto its shopping site by waiving sales commissions and allowing retailers to use popular third-party payment and order management services like Shopify instead of the company's own systems. Currently, commissions on Google Shopping range from a 5 percent to 15 percent cut depending on the products.
Google is usually the starting point for finding information on the internet, but that is often not the case when consumers are searching for a product to buy. More consumers in the United States are turning first to Amazon to find products that they plan to purchase. This has allowed Amazon to build a rapidly growing advertising business, which is a threat to Google's main financial engine. Google's seven-year battle to take on Amazon has had more lows than highs. In 2013, it started a shopping service called Google Shopping Express, offering free same-day delivery. It offered $95 annual memberships for faster delivery and it tried delivering groceries. Google eventually scrapped the efforts. Google Express evolved into an online shopping mall filled with top retailers like Target and Best Buy. In 2017, it added Walmart to its virtual mall, but the partnership was short-lived. Last year, Google ditched Google Express for Google Shopping and introduced a buy button to allow shoppers to use credit cards stored with the company to complete the transaction without leaving the search engine.
Google is usually the starting point for finding information on the internet, but that is often not the case when consumers are searching for a product to buy. More consumers in the United States are turning first to Amazon to find products that they plan to purchase. This has allowed Amazon to build a rapidly growing advertising business, which is a threat to Google's main financial engine. Google's seven-year battle to take on Amazon has had more lows than highs. In 2013, it started a shopping service called Google Shopping Express, offering free same-day delivery. It offered $95 annual memberships for faster delivery and it tried delivering groceries. Google eventually scrapped the efforts. Google Express evolved into an online shopping mall filled with top retailers like Target and Best Buy. In 2017, it added Walmart to its virtual mall, but the partnership was short-lived. Last year, Google ditched Google Express for Google Shopping and introduced a buy button to allow shoppers to use credit cards stored with the company to complete the transaction without leaving the search engine.
Re:Being that Amazon has been delaying shipping (Score:5, Informative)
Amazon hit their limits for overuse because of the Stay at Home order that was caused by COVID-19 fears. They can't predict today's load, so that's why the slowdowns went random.
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Oh They can predict it. They are not at full shutdown. They are still staff working. Yes I can expect delays but Amazon should be telling me that on the site.
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They're at the opposite of shutdown, they're at capacity.
Re:Being that Amazon has been delaying shipping (Score:5, Interesting)
zon has been using Covid-19 as a lame excuse to delay shipping of products, for over a month if not more.
Why would you call it a "lame excuse"? There is simply not enough shipping/delivery capacity in the US to handle the demand spike. It's not a matter of just payimg UPS more: Amazon is already more than half of UPS's capacity. Amazon has been building their own delivery capacity as fast as they can for years now, not because they want to be in that business, but simply because there's no excess capacity in UPS to handle growth.
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The problem is they don't update communicate to the customer that. They have products marked as shipped, but never delivered. Then when you try to get more info they blame UPS for it.
Apparently their IT Staff can't be bothered to update the records with accurate data.
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Perhaps the products were shipped, but never delivered? And UPS is to blame for that?
You can tell when Amazon has messed up, because the UPS tracker will only show 1 scan, the one Amazon does, but it won't show any movement or scans by UPS. That means the box got lost before it made it onto a UPS truck/trailer (it's a bit ambiguous, as it could have been lost by UPS before it got to their first distribution center, but I'm happy to blame Amazon). Once UPS actually has the package, it's on them.
If you ord
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If they're really delaying shipping for a month then it has fuck-all to do with shipping capacity. Many Amazon deliveries still show up quickly. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to which orders are delayed, either.
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They are doing some prioritizing, not just throwing everything at UPS and bemoaning their fate. Some orders are deliberately being held back because of the limited shipping capacity, in an attempt to get more important stuff to people on time. Of course, their ideas on what's important are arbitrary.
In my experience with them, they're honest about the stuff that will take a month, but this could well vary by region. Delivery quality often does with Amazon, great in one city and shit in another.
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Hey I live in Cattle Country not Corn Country.
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This has failed before... (Score:2)
This reminds me of the launch of NBCi, the CNET-started portal site that used to be called Snap.com. They offered rebates all over the place, then claimed they had a record amount of throughput. Sorry, that never turned into profit, so this was a flash in the pan.
Free commissions? That's a launch stunt, not a sustainable business.
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Any major competition could sour the whole industry. Before Amazon was the dominant player, they weren't really making profits. Heck, even now their profits are pretty lame compared to their size. Any real competition would drive customers to the lowest prices (lowest margins/profits). The few pennies price difference could cost Amazon a sale...
Also, revenue != profits. Profits is what companies pay taxes on. Just look at how much taxes a public corp pays, and then triple that to figure out their "true" pro
Re:This has failed before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before Amazon was the dominant player, they weren't really making profits.
Amazon has always made an upfront profit on sales, and sunk the difference into spending for growth, thus having no profits at the bottom of the balance sheet. I'm not sure why so many people have a problem understanding this distinction. AWS is much the same.
When a business is growing as fast as it can, and spending all it can afford on the hiring, real estate, and equipment needed for that growth, obviously it won't have anything left over. Saying a growing business is "not making a profit" is content-free. What's their up-front margin? Where's the money going? Those are the interesting questions.
Just look at how much taxes a public corp pays, and then triple that to figure out their "true" profit (e.g. ~35% tax).
Pretty useless approach for multinational corporations, as they have great flexibility to show a profit in one country and a loss in another. Also, for companies with real infrastructure (buildings and assembly lines and the like), taxable profit is based on a depreciation schedule for those purchases, which may or may not resemble the actual cashflow. E.g., if your manufacturing plant depreciates on a 20-year schedule, but you financed it with 15-year debt, you can go bankrupt while all the while showing taxable profit.
I didn't even know Google had a shopping site (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you haven't run into scam products on Amazon yet, you are lucky. There are all kinds of knock-offs and fake products on Amazon. Those $40 "official" NFL jerseys, for example. I don't trust Google--or Amazon--when it comes to brands. Still, I would shop from either, because both would make it right if you got a bad product.
So, eBay? (Score:2)
I assume Google is just looking to be the 3rd party between sellers and buyers and not be a seller itself. Amazon has become so much more than just a website, it's a logistics giant with it's own trucks, aircraft and warehouses. I could see Google cutting a giant deal with UPS/Fedex/USPS to get consistent shipping for it's storefront as a way to get people to use it's service over Amazon as that to me is the real key for consumers. Everyone wants their stuff delivered in that 24-48 hour window with no ha
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Yeah it's a free for all, that's both the appeal and downside of eBay, but I assume Google would curate it's products and sellers to a much tighter degree. I compare to eBay by business model as eBay is just a site to connect sellers and buyers and facilitate transactions, they don't take part in shipping or any of the logistics like Amazon does. I assume Google is taking that same general tact, i don't expect a Google warehouse packing and shipping orders.
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Yeah it's a free for all, that's both the appeal and downside of eBay, but I assume Google would curate it's products and sellers to a much tighter degree. I compare to eBay by business model as eBay is just a site to connect sellers and buyers and facilitate transactions, they don't take part in shipping or any of the logistics like Amazon does. I assume Google is taking that same general tact, i don't expect a Google warehouse packing and shipping orders.
eBay does have their Global Shipping Program (actually run by Pitney Bowes). I have used it, but it is slower and more expensive than having the vendor ship directly. It's easier for the vendor but not so much for the customer.
Now that Amazon has performed slash and burn on th (Score:2)
Needs to be the other way (Score:2)
Amazon should make twitch and their other video services a true YouTube competitor. They can sell ads and use the unsold ad inventory to promote Amazon stuff.
There's lots of online shopping competition. YouTube needs a strong competitor.
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The fundamental problem YouTube has is: they treat their contractors (YouTubers who make money form the site) like shit. Worse than the likes of Uber. Would competition make that better? Depends on the competitor. Offhand, if I were to name a company that actually treats its workers worse than YouTube, the only one that pops to mind is "Amazon". So maybe not.
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Amazon has close to a million workers and you think they're all treated badly because a couple dozen of them complain in a performance for news media propaganda stories every year.
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No, I think they're treated badly because I worked there for four damn years. Paid well, but treated badly. I also worked on some of the software they use to manage warehouse workers, which is the only job I've ever left due to ethical concerns. Amazon manage people with bots and treats them like shit, but the job can pay well. Pretty much the same problems YouTube has, only more so.
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Google's rapid fail coming back to bite them (Score:5, Interesting)
Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither did Amazon get to where it is now in a few years. It was a long haul, and one of continuous re-investment in the business. How many times did we hear that Amazon is profitable, but puts all profit back into growth, so the net financials show losses?
That doesn't work well with Google's MO. Outside of a few areas like core search and Gmail, Google has been unable to stick with something and invest in it to enable that growth and market dominance. The list of abandoned Google projects which never got out of "beta" is a mile long.
You can never compete meaningfully that way, as Google's own multi-year fits and starts manifest here.
Except having #1 share in mobile OS and browser (Score:3)
That doesn't work well with Google's MO. Outside of a few areas like core search and Gmail, Google has been unable to stick with something and invest in it to enable that growth and market dominance. The list of abandoned Google projects which never got out of "beta" is a mile long.
You can never compete meaningfully that way, as Google's own multi-year fits and starts manifest here.
You forgot a few very important areas there, buddy:
yeah, Google frustrates me. They do stupid things and haven't done much exciting lately, but if you're going to make a blanket generalization, you have to consider their past accomplishments in that equation. You also have to consider their talent pool as most engineers consider them the best place to work. All t
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It's not that Google never sticks with anything. It's that Google never sticks with anything which doesn't achieve substantial success right away. All those examples you gave were places where Google made major headway early in the product's life.
Never heard of any of those things (Score:3)
I use google every day (less than I used too I'll admit) often searching for products to buy. It seems like I should have at least heard of some of these things. Given that the article indicates they all died after about a year I guess I didn't really miss anything.
I occasionally would remember there used to be a "Shopping" link at the top bar and click it when looking for alternatives, find it was mostly filled with irrelevant items and then forget about it again. I just checked and its still there, stuffed under whatever hamburgerly icon they're using today to signify this is google's junk drawer. Its in there, hanging out near the bottom with something called "Duo".
I'm not saying google should shove this thing in your face or clutter up the page like yahoo from the late 90s, but given that something in the neighborhood of 95% of searches are performed on google, many of them shopping related...it seems like they might want to make their offering a little easier to find.
When I want to shop, (Score:4, Interesting)
I go to a shopping mall or a store, whether they be 'bricks and mortar' or virtual. I don't go to an advertising company. Worse yet for Google, outside the tech community there isn't much awareness that they even are an advertising company. To most they're just a search engine that offers email and phone apps - why would anybody think of shopping there?
Even if Google can get the public to buy into them as an Amazon alternative, and can get past their historical inability to long-term commit to any new initiative, they still have at least one pretty big hurdle to jump. How many businesses will be willing give advertising dollars to a company that's making noises about possibly becoming their competitor? Who could trust Google to not favour their own products over those of their advertisers / competitors? Amazon is in a similar position right now, but they have the strengths of incumbency and mindshare. Google is starting from scratch, with no track record and no history of trustworthiness.
In the online retail space Google will be to Amazon what the Microsoft Store was to the Apple Store. This idea has 'fail' written all over it.
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To most they're just a search engine that offers email and phone apps - why would anybody think of shopping there?
Ironically, I think they had a lot more brand awareness back when they were calling it "Froogle". Pun aside, it was actually excellent branding, because it conveyed the idea that you were using the power of Google's search to find the best deals possible. Anecdotally anyway, I used it a lot more, as did my friends both techie and non-techie. But then they decided to rebrand it as Google along with everything else, spread it into search results mixed with identical-looking sponsored results so you couldn't e
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Physical stores were dying off even before Covid. You'd drive down the street and see lots of closed shops in say January. I found I had to drive further and have ever less choice if physically shopping.
Except for the common basics (milk, white flower, regular laundry detergent, etc.) you almost have to get it online.
The practicality of physical specialty stores was slowly dying, but Covid cranked up the pace.
Pharmacy-related stores (AKA "drug stores") are especially closin
The battle of who gets the most user data... (Score:2)
If it's a combination of money and Google, (Score:2)
Network effect (Score:1)
The network effect is important for online stores because shoppers want one-stop shopping (variety) and speed. Coordinated logistics of zillions of products is necessary to do that. Google may have to merge with the likes of Walmart* (#2) and/or multiple 3rd-level co's to get big enough quickly to compete with Amazon. Without some kind of merging, Google is probably SOL in this field. It's likely too late to start almost from scratch. For e-commerce, it's consolidate or die.
* Anti-trust regulation may preve