Google's New Offer to Retailers:
Google is giving shoppers a way to buy products without leaving Google.
Selected Coach and Kate Spade products can now be purchased within Google Search and the Gemini app. A customer finds an item, taps "Buy" and pays with Google Pay.
The retailer receives the order and fulfils it and the customer never visits the retailer’s website.
For retailers, the superficial appeal is clear. Google is where many people start looking for products, and remains the dominant digital location for product-specific searches.
If it can turn more of those searches into orders, why would a retailer say "No" to this new way to interact with consumers?
Sounds great, right? Before we all become too excited, let's unpack this from the retailer's perspective.
Moving the buying journey into Google changes what the retailer learns about a person who just purchased its product.
To understand the concern, take Google out of the picture for a moment and let's look at this in another way. Think of Google as a "shopping mall".
The Shopping Mall Analogy:
Imagine a retail brand like Levi’s who has a store in a busy mall and the mall owner approaches Levi’s with a new offer...
“Each time potential customers come through our mall entrance looking for jeans, we are going to meet and interact with them. We will answer their questions and, if they are ready, we will take their order and process the transaction for you. They will not need to come into your store. And then we will send you the order so you can supply the jeans.”
Customers might like it, because they already know the style, colour and size they want. Buying at the entrance saves them a very short walk.
But there is no brand experience, not upselling, no deeper engagement to understand the product better, and no chance to introduce new ranges or new product offers.
And what about those consumers who didn't buy at the entrance? The mall says it will answer as best it can but Levi’s retail staff will never meet and interact with the shoppers to save the sale.
Levi’s is also blind to the questions and interactions that led to a confirmed sale. And more importantly the retailer is not given the reasons the other shoppers walked away.
Customer Interactions = Retailer Evolution:
A good store employee learns from both successful and unsuccessful interactions with people. This is how the store experiences improves.
They identify where its products, information, services, and product guarantees add value to buying journeys, or become blockers to successful buying experiences.
The digital interactions create the same behavioural clues. Retailers can see what people search for, what they compare, where they hesitate and where they leave.
In online retail, this access to digital first party data is a critical source to a retailer's evolution.
LuluLemon Warning:
Lululemon is a warning here. It has extensive customer data and direct customer contact, yet it is now working to strengthen its products after a sharp decline in sales. The lesson is that access to customer signals means little unless a retailer listens and acts on them.
So while Lululemon goes back to its "roots" to find out what's important to their customers, Google could put itself between the retailer and those customer signals.
Google has said the retailer continues to be the "seller" and receives customer and transaction information. But with no context, how valuable is this?
This missing customer-centric knowledge has a cost. Retailers use it to make better decisions about stock, product information, sizing advice and the way they help people buy.
Why does the mall want to stand at the entrance?
The mall owner is not doing all this for the retailer.
The entrance is a valuable place to influence what shoppers see, what they buy and where they buy. If the mall controls those conversations, retailers will become more dependent on it to reach customers.
For decades the mall owners wanted to play a role in contributing to the consumers journey in buying. Google wants the same: to own more of the journey, and the transaction is the final piece of the puzzle. In other words, Google wants more first party data.
The Marketplace Movie:
Retailers have seen this movie before with marketplaces. Marketplaces espoused the virtues of expanding reach and becoming that mechanism to drive new customer acquisition.
Did it work? For many retailers, the promised customer acquisition came with a cost and fell short of expectations.
What is Google Giving Retailers?:
So the important question is not simply, “Did Google send us more orders?” The questions that need to be considered are...
- Did those orders come from genuinely new customers?
- Will they be profitable when factoring fulfilment and returns?
- Do those customers return to buy directly from the retailer?
Google’s offer may become a useful way to introduce customers to a brand. But retailers need to look at this with their eyes wide open. You may receive an order but at the cost of losing the conversation that explains the customer.
And over time, losing those conversations (first party data) makes it harder to improve, harder to build/maintain a relationship and harder to control the future of the business.
About Greg Randall
Greg Randall is an eCommerce consultant and the founder of Comma Consulting. He has spent more than 25 years working with retailers and B2B's, helping them understand what is getting in the way of better digital performance.
His work combines eCommerce strategy, customer experience design, data and commercial pattern recognition to identify the issues that matter and what businesses should do about them.
This article was as tagged as Agentic Commerce , AI eCommerce , Digital Strategy , eCommerce Consulting , UX Design