It is widely believed that Google’s next major progression will be a focus on becoming entirely transactional. This is already present in Product Listing Ads (PLA’s) and would be seemingly straightforward to introduce to additional search results.

The buttons will accompany sponsored—or paid—search results, often displayed under a “Shop on Google” heading at the top of the page. Buttons won't appear with the non-sponsored results that are driven by Google’s basic search algorithm.

What does this mean for retailers?

This would be charged on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) model, but the main concern is that this will effectively turn Google into a marketplace, meaning less traffic to the retailer’s website. Google is set to counter this by co-branding pages, and also allowing opt-in’s to mailing list, however this still means that as a retailer you are set to lose control of the customer journey.

The success and/or failure of this will ultimately be down to revenue. It will quickly become apparent whether this is helping retailers or simply allowing Google to take a larger slice of the market.

Only time will tell. Ultimately, detracting too heavily from the retailers will ensure failure, therefore we can be relatively certain that this should help sales, rather than hindering them.

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