It’s been talked about for months, but Google has finally confirmed that a ‘Buy’ button for its search engine is now on the way.
The inevitable arrived courtesy of Omid Kordestani, the company’s chief business officer, during an appearance at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
Kordestani reasoned that allowing searchers to go straight through a payment barrier once they’ve found something they like would cut out a certain level of ‘friction’ around at present.
It’s believed that Google intends to develop transactional pages that would eradicate the need for users to stray from the engine as they purchase.
The move could sound major repercussions across the retail spectrum, while having a buy button on Google search – often the first port-of-call for shoppers – could see the company bite into a significant chunk of the affiliate industry’s takings.
Buy is announced
Rumours over a launch for Google’s ‘Buy’ button have been gathering pace since December, when reports suggested the firm had held talks with a number of big retailers.
From the merchants’ view, the news could work very much in their favour. They retain all new customer information – such as email addresses and other shared details – and follow the same script when it comes to posting items.
The step that Google intends to seize control of is perhaps one of the most crucial in the retail journey; the route to payment. Should ‘Buy’ take off and users trust Google to facilitate their purchases, retailers would essentially be able to use the engine’s sizeable traffic to drive sales through another online method.
With smaller purchases, or in cases when users have visited a store to trial a product, shoppers could bypass a lengthy research phase that leads them to purchasing a specific item.
Branching out
The ‘buy’ button would be added to Google’s various merchant tools – including its ‘Shopping’ price comparison service – and could put the company way up there in terms of competition for Amazon – another marketplace which only sells the items of others.
But despite Google being able to influence what people see when they visit the world’s most-popular search engine, some of its tech flops have only sought to prove that power doesn’t necessarily drive popularity.
Only this week reports mounted over ‘big changes’ to Google Wallet – the company’s system for making payments in-store and online – which looks to be suffering from a serious lack of user adoption.
The technology is set to be overshadowed by the launch of Android Pay, which contains improved functionality and direct access to users of the world’s most popular mobile OS.
What do you think? Will Google’s ‘Buy’ button represent a game-changer for retailers and affiliates or will adoption let it down?