Google have announced that they are going to open up shopping results to non paid adverts but what does that mean for online product sales.
In my opinion this has been done as a way to claw back lost market share from Amazon rather than just to help retailers. I think Google has realized that more and more customers are starting and finishing their online purchase journey completely in Amazon. This is a huge risk to Google as if it loses its market share in this sector it will affect its Ads business profoundly over all.
What I believe Google are trying to do is make the shopping search results a direct competitor, they are going to remove the restriction of advertisers having to pay to play, similar to Amazon’s organic results . It looks like They are also going to allow customers to purchase straight from the Shopping results page removing the issue of individual sites with poor user experience. Google is trying to make the shopping results of the new Amazon.
So Google is giving our free listings to try and increase products in its shopping results in order to drive more people to use this way of searching. The slight issue is that you have to have an error free merchant feed for this to work, most people who have error free merchant feeds will already be advertising, although they might increase the total number of products that they offer. The second issues is that like amazon the way to drive sales is through paid activity so i dont think these free ads on Google are likely to be a silver bullet but i hope i am proved wrong
https://blog.google/products/shopping/its-now-free-to-sell-on-google