Google takes on Amazon as it drops commission fee on e-commerce platform

Search giant, Google on July 23 announced that it will be nixing commission fees for retailers selling products on the company’s shopping platform. According to a blog post, the company said that soon, sellers who participate in the ‘Buy on Google’ checkout experience will no longer have to pay the commission fee. The ‘significant change’ to its e-commerce marketplace product will now allow sellers ranging from small retailers to big businesses to sell products on its site without paying the 10 to 15 per cent of the sale, which it earlier used to charge. 

While announcing the new changes on its blog post, Google also informed that the company is letting retailers use third-party platforms like Shopify and Paypal to get on the ‘Buy on Google’ platform. The search giant informed that the new changed are, however, only laughing in the United States as of now, although they are looking forward to bringing it to international markets later this year and in 2021. 

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The company said, “By removing our commission fees, we’re lowering the cost of doing business and making it even easier for retailers of all sizes to sell directly on Google, starting with a pilot that we’ll expand to all eligible sellers in the U.S. over the coming months”. 

With new significant changes, Google aims to build up its shopping service by luring sellers to list their items there in addition to other platforms. The move by the search giant also comes in a bid to catch up to Amazon, which is a dominant e-commerce market place. Amazon is the undisputed leader in online sales and Google, on the other hand, isn’t a major e-commerce player. With the new changes, the search giant plans to take on Amazon, which charges a commission of sellers who use the service. 

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Goal to make digital commerce more accessible 

The new changes announced by Google will now also let sellers import their inventory data to the search engine’s service from other e-commerce platforms, including Amazon. Google informed that in a bid to simplify the tools and make them more compatible with merchants’ existing processes, the company will enable commonly-used ‘product feed formats’. Further, Google is also adding a new option to let retailers add product information by pulling from the existing database rather than having to upload it themselves. 

Google said, “While we still have much work ahead of us, our goal is to make digital commerce more accessible for retailers of all sizes all around the world, giving consumers more choice and more ways to find the best products, stores, and prices”. 

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