Google are testing their new Buy Button live on mobiles. It’s a way for Google not only to start becoming more like a marketplace instead of simply a search engine but also, more importantly from Google’s perspective, a way to start driving transaction volume through their Google Wallet.
Under the Purchases on Google tests, When a shopper searches on mobile for a product they may see a shopping ad with ‘Buy on Google’ text. After clicking the ad, the shopper is taken to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google. Checkout is seamless using the saved payment credentials in the shoppers Google Account.
This is big news as it means two things – firstly it’s time to sign up to Google’s shopping ads and secondly it’s time to make sure you’re set up to take Google payments. As soon as you’re able to do both you may be included in the Purchase on Google tests.
Google say “Although we’re still in early experiments with a limited number of retailers, we see Purchases on Google as a big step towards helping retailers drive more mobile conversions and win more customers“.
Google play friendly with shopping apps
Google have also started to work with a select group of global retailers including eBay, Flipkart and Zalando to add deep links to their apps right in their shopping ads, driving people straight to their mobile app instead of their website.
Google said that “This is a tremendous new opportunity for retailers and app developers to drive engagement with their shopping apps, and we’ll be expanding it to more advertisers in the coming months“.
What this means for online retailers is that you’d best make very certain that your listings display well on eBay’s mobile app – if it doesn’t any traffic that Google drives to the app will be wasted. Forget whether your eBay listing looks good in a mobile browser, check what it looks like in eBay’s mobile app.
3 Responses
In 10 years of selling different products on different sites, with using agencies or trying myself and most recently having a Google account manager I have never come close to making Adwords or products or whatever its now called now having an acceptable conversion cost.
Bryn
Google will penalise your listings if it’s not mobile browser friendly, so you would ideally want to be working on both mobile browsers and ebays peculiar little app.
If you’ve got neither, generally mobile friendly will be more important for this – as you won’t even show up never mind if your description displays properly. I imagine this will be rolled out to being able to add your own mobile friendly websites (which may require a review or just their systematic checks) over next few months, and if so that would be a better alternative to relying on the ebay app if you have a mobile friendly website.
Confused, wasn’t Google pay closed down in favour of Google wallet? Which we were then told could only used to purchase digital goods.
Should we be offering Google payment on our website checkouts to get this, or is this form of payment just for the Google listings.
Google ad conversions are terrible for most businesses this will hopefully increase and make it easier to track conversion.