Inside Google's fierce Goliath-versus-Goliath fight against Amazon for shopping dollars

With more of the decision making process taking place before the consumer ever enters the store (Google Research finds 83% of US shoppers who visited a store say they used online search before they went in), retailers should also be working to ensure that the online brand discovery experience is equally as exciting as immersive physical ones.

Starting from the search engine, Google quickly and decisively entered and protected the Internet value chain—always with the goal to protect the crown jewel and only real money-making machine: Search.

About five years ago, a revenue line buried in the back of Amazon's accounts started to get quite big. ‘Other revenue’ was over $4bn by the end of 2017, and if you looked at the notes to the notes, you discovered that this was ‘primarily’ advertising. By 2019 this had grown to $14bn, and I wrote about it here, pointing out that ‘Amazon’ was no long... See more

this is traffic that stores are paying for already via FB, Google Ads, etc. Because Shopify already makes money through SaaS, Payments, etc, it can effectively “bundle” demand gen into its product, offering traffic at below-market rates. That could be net good for merchants, even if they may lose the occasional purchase to a competitor. The reality... See more

Most people don’t need a history lesson to know that Google has changed; they feel it. Try searching for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see that what was once a small teal bar featuring one “sponsored link” is now a hard-to-decipher, multi-scroll slog, filled with paid-product carousels; multiple paid-link ads; the dreaded, algorithmically... See more