Online shopping has enabled a world of convenience -- whether you’re looking for a new pair of shoes or car accessories, there are numerous online destinations from where you can find and browse product options. But given the multitude of these very options, it is often challenging to find answers to questions like “Where can I find a red short-sleeved dress” or “Where can I find the best deal?”
India has the second largest population of internet users in the world, and it’s only getting bigger. While 400 million Indians are online today, less than one out of three buy things online. On the business front, there are 58 million SMBs in India, of which 35 percent are engaged in retail trade (Source: Sixth Economic Census). However, a very small number of them have an online presence -- there clearly exists a huge opportunity for retailers to surface their merchandize to the millions of online consumers.
At Google, our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful to everyone. That’s why today we are bringing a new and exciting shopping search experience to India. This is a personalised and immersive experience that will help you easily filter through offers, review prices from multiple retailers and find that right product. This experience will get richer with usage and is available across several Google products: the first is a made-to-browse (think window shopping!) experience on the new Shopping home page. We are also making the same experience available to users with entry level phones, through a Progressive Web App (PWA). Further, starting today, you will also see a new Shopping tab on Google Search. Finally we are introducing Style Search in Google Lens, an all-new visual approach to find the products you are looking for.
For retailers, Merchant Center has always been the place to upload store and product data for Shopping ads. Now you can also use Merchant Center to upload product details so they can appear across Google, without paying for ad campaigns. So far, the Merchant Center has been only available in English, and starting today we are expanding it to Hindi. With these changes, our aim is to empower many more retailers in India to participate and reach millions of internet users.
Shopping home page
The Shopping home page is a new made-to-browse destination for shoppers to search across multiple product categories and find products from thousands of retailers. To make the shopping experience richer, we have added some smart features, including price drops and a collection of the most popular products on Google.
Shopping tab in Google Search
You will now see a new ‘Shopping’ tab in Google Search showing a list of products matching your search, with the ability to view details and review prices across retailers. Queries can be made in both English and Hindi.
Style search in Google Lens
Have you ever looked at an awesome pair of shoes and wondered where you could buy them from? With Google Lens, you can now find similar products -- such as clothes, furniture, and home decor - just by using your phone camera. Simply point your camera at the product and we’ll do the rest!
From seasoned desktop shoppers to first-time users with entry-level smartphones, we hope these new shopping experiences will make finding what you’re looking for just a little bit easier. For merchants, we are supporting and partnering with the entire retail ecosystem -- be it shopping sites, to large retailers, to small local shops -- to give them the tools and technology to scale and thrive in today’s digital economy. We hope this enables all kinds of retailers, especially those who have never had an online presence, to reach millions of new consumers.
Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Vice President - Product Management, Google Shopping