In this article:
- Google wants to serve as the ultimate portal to shopping via its search.
- To that end, it has introduced some new features to make that experience more seamless and to work across more devices.
Shopping at your fingertips reaches new levels with Google’s shopping new features. The company has been trying to tie together search with shopping for years, but retailers often had to deal with manual processes to make it work for them. To address that, it is rolling out new shopping features.
They include extending Google Lens, which “makes the products you see instantly shoppable,” to desktops and iOs.“Soon, you will be able to select images, video, and text content on a website with Lens to quickly see search results in the same tab — without leaving the page you’re on,” declares Google.
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Search results will also merge directly into shopping on mobile. That is thanks to “Google’s Shopping Graph, a comprehensive, real-time dataset of products, inventory, and merchants with more than 24 billion listings.”
(24 billion. wonder what I will buy next)
Google explains that putting in a “search for ‘cropped jackets,’” will activate “a visual feed of jackets in various colors and styles, alongside other helpful information like local shops, style guides, and videos.” Shoppers can then filter it further by style, brand, etc., and then compare prices and ratings.
What helps shoppers find more things to buy also helps sellers get found, and that is the appeal to those who have otherwise felt compelled to join Amazon or some other platform to gain some visibility on their own.
That benefit is even more important for physical stores that need to draw customers from their local area. With Google’s promise to make its Search extend to what’s in stock, shoppers can add that as a filter to identify which local stores have what they want available now.
Google offered the example of finding a child’s bike helmet in stock at a nearby store: “A search for ‘kids bike helmet near me’ using the new ‘in stock’ filter shows retailers in San Francisco with kids bike helmets on their shelves, clicking into Mike’s Bikes of San Francisco.”
The opportunity for smart, data-driven marketers with integrated data and cross-channel campaign management capabilities to not only enjoy the exposure like others but also leverage new data points into an even more relevant communication strategy. For that kind of adaptable marketing leaders, this thing can become the beginning of a new line of opportunities.