Google, in the fight against Amazon, tries to make a change of image of its electronic commerce to recover advertisers

Google, an unlikely loser, is struggling to follow the rhythm of Amazon.com Inc. in the battle for billions in advertising dollars of e-commerce (electronic commerce).

In its last change of strategy, the Alphabet Inc. unit said Wednesday that it is updating the appearance and format of the product search pages to present images of clothing, accessories and other items to look more like a digital store instead insteadof a long list of links and text.

The change is part of a broader reform that Google has carried out during the pandemic to encourage its wobbly e-commerce operation.During the past year, Google stopped demanding from merchants to be announced so that their products appear in purchasing searches.He also stopped charging commissions for purchases and joined Shopify Inc. to simplify the search lists of 1.7 million merchants.

Google seeks to protect your main search and advertising business of the continuous invasion of Amazon and the ambitions of Walmart Inc., Target Corp. and others that have begun to sell ads as part of the e-commerce operations.

Although Google dominates broadly in Digital Searches and advertising, Amazon's dominant leadership in electronic commerce has made it the starting point for approximately 53% of searches for consumer goods in the United States.Pursuing these clicks, advertisers have changed their expenses, raising Amazon's participation in search ads sales to a fifth of the market and reducing Google's participation to 57% from 61% in 2019, according to the research firmEMARKERTER MARKET.

During the first half of this year, Amazon reported US $ 14,820 million in advertising sales, an 82% increase over the same period of the previous year.Google's total advertising income is more than six times higher, but a little less than 50% grew during the same period.

Amazon's accelerated advertising business has raised alarms within Google, which led the Likea Pichai executive director to assure the Alphabet Board to rejuvenate its weakened e-commerce efforts is a priority, according to former Google executives.You must fix a problem created by Google.The company has restarted its digital purchasing strategy at least four times for two decades and has had five leaders of its electronic commerce operations in 10 years, the former executives said.

"Google is almost like the living dead" in the e-commerce, said Guru Hariharan, executive director of Commerceiq, an online retail service provider."No one goes there to buy."

Google's current strategy reflects its focus on the smartphones market, according to executives and observers of the industry.As much as the company built the Android open source operating system as an alternative to the “Walled Garden” that Apple Inc. developed around its iPhone ecosystem, Google executives want to become the search solution for consumer companies for companiesDirect that seek life outside the Amazon Purchasing and Compliance System.

"It's an unimportant world if you wake up in a few years and there is only one place to buy things," said Bill Ready, Google's president.

Pichai recruited Ready of Paypal Holdings Inc. in 2019 to lead the Google recovery initiative.Although he was an stranger, he was familiar with the winding history of electronic commerce of the technology company.

In 2002, he launched his first online shopping site, Froogle, to classify products.That evolved a decade later to the Google Shopping tab.To avoid listing the exhausted inventory, it made merchants buy ads of the catalog of their products so that their products appeared in purchasing searches.That promoted Google's income, but hindered its ability to attract advertisement options from smaller companies, said former executives and observers of the industry.A lower number of ads made it less attractive to consumers, which contributed to a lower number of searches.

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Meanwhile, Amazon persuaded more clothing and consumer products companies packaged to change their Google advertising budgets, said Mudit Jaju, Global E-Commerce director of Wavemaker, a media agency."Google was no longer the gateway to the consumer," he said.

Ready has tried to reverse these trends by dividing the purchasing team into two groups: one focused on consumers and another in merchants.He also cut the cycle of new functions from nine months to six weeks, said former executives.

Last year, he eliminated the requirement to pay for advertisements to appear and made the product lists free.He also negotiated the association with Shopify, which has emerged as a counterweight for Amazon by helping companies create and manage online stores.Google introduced a “Turnkey System” (specially designed for a certain function) in Shopify that allows its customers to list products in purchasing searches and develop Google advertising campaigns for those listings.

El fabricante de relojes que vende directo al consumidor, Talley & Twine Watch Co., luchó durante años para publicar productos en Google Shopping a través de Shopify porque tenía que ingresar manualmente los 200 relojes que vendía, afirmó Randy Williams, fundador de la compañía en Virginia Beach, Virginia. La asociación Shopify-Google introdujo una tecnología que importa automáticamente información de productos de Shopify y posibilitó la creación rápida de anuncios de Google.

“Antes era muy complicado”, afirmó Williams. Dijo que las mejoras llevaron a Talley & Twine a cambiar su presupuesto publicitario de Facebook Inc. a Google. Este año, gastó US$ 100.000 en anuncios de Google y obtuvo más de US$ 400.000 en ventas con esas promociones.

During the three months that ended in June, Google reported that advertising revenues increased 69% to US $ 50,440 million, being the retail trade the largest taxpayer.

The growth of sales coincided with the closure of stores through the pandemic and the impulse of online retailers.It also occurred when Apple's new privacy restrictions on iPhones led advertisers to remove Facebook budgets.

"Google had a stroke of luck," said Wavemaker Jaju, who has recently had customers who changed their ads to the company.

Google's next changes focus on consumers.Ready said that the new visual search experience would lead users to write “cut jackets” to a destination page that looks more like a search for purchases of Amazon, which shows rows of jacket images, than to the current offer ofGoogle text links.Google said their format tests found that users appreciated being able to see brands and styles faster.

In the future, he wants to unite the e-commerce with the entire set of Google offers, from searches to maps and YouTube.Ready imagines that people are watching a YouTube video of someone by opening a new clothing package and that viewers can click nearby to buy the items, or that an advertisement is shown in the search for Google if they then look for clothes.

Google's work has so far done little to loosen Amazon's dominance.During the past year, the e-commerce giant increased its participation in products searches by 1 percentage point, reaching 54%, according to Channeladvisor Corp., an electronic commerce consulting firm.

"It is clearly a very competitive space," said Ready.

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