Have you ever wished that when you digitally search for something, for example, a geeky shirt or a hard to find book, that you’d be able to buy it directly from the results page, rather than having to click on so many things before you can actually make a purchase? No? Well, Google is about to make that come true as they will reportedly be introducing the Buy Button to your search result page in the very near future.
But this will only happen on mobile searches and not on your desktop (yet) and the tech giant believes this will make life easier for consumers who have had a hard time buying stuff on their smaller screens. When you click on the buy button, you will then be led to another Google page where you’ll be able to complete the transaction, by choosing the size, color, shipping options, payment options, etc. The information will just be entered once and then stored and later loaded for future purchases. The contact information like address. phone numbers will be shared with the retailer, but the payment info will be for Google’s eyes only.
It will be the retailers themselves who will still provide the products and ship them to the customers. The buy button will only appear in the sponsored search results and not the organic ones. They are set to appear in just a small percentage of the results, but the goal is to of course, make it bigger. This may signal a big shift for Google, as this will actually bring them in competition of some sort with online retail bigwigs like Amazon and Ebay.
Not everyone is crazy about this supposed move though, as it could actually weaken retailers’ connection to their customers because everything will now go through Google. But the search (soon to be retail?) giant will be doing some things to preserve that connection, like letting customers opt-in to marketing programs that are also available on the retailers’ sites. Another concern would be those people who just genuinely want to search for information, but may be bombarded with buy now buttons that they don’t really want to see. Let’s wait and see for Google’s final say on this.
VIA: Wall Street Journal
