Amazon to Not Pay For Google Shopping Listings
In what we can catalog in the “extremely interesting yet not terribly shocking but very impactful” news section, Amazon has stated that they have pulled their listings from Google Shopping.
Anyone who’s done product searches on the previously free Google Product Search/Shopping will remember seeing Amazon monopolizing many of the top search results given that a) Google considered them a very high authority site, and b) there’s nearly nothing that Amazon doesn’t sell.
As a result of this news, retailers not named Amazon will no longer have to compete with their biggest competitor who in theory would have a near limitless budget in Google Shopping spending.
The reasons for their motivations in doing so are speculative. Aside from the obvious savings in advertising costs, this New York Times article speculates that Amazon is seeing Google as a threat to being a one-stop destination for shopping online, a position that Amazon has been king of for quite some time now, so by removing their listings from Google it limits the consumer choices who will have to go to Amazon instead.
This isn’t to say that Google Shopping won’t still have a huge number of retailers listed for any given search result, but it’s a bold statement by Amazon both symbolically and from a practicality standpoint. The gloves are now off as Google is set on taking a bigger role in the retail space, but Amazon is intent on being the alpha dog in this space.
In all it’s good news for retailers, large or small to not have to compete with Amazon for eyeballs on their products, similar to an MLB team learning that the high budgeted Yankees are bowing out of the season. Since Google Shopping Ads’ costs will be determined by the market, similar to Adwords (which interestingly enough Amazon is still on), one less high spender should in theory lower costs and increase visiblity for the rest.
*On a somewhat related note, I just discovered that Amazon’s logo has an arrow going from “A-Z”, indicating they sell everything…from A to Z.
Edit: Upon further review it appears as if Amazon is only pulling their own product line, such as the Kindle from Google Shopping, not items related populated through their marketplace, for the time being at least.
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