While we are seeing a pandemic unfold in front of our eyes which is the Coronavirus pandemic, we are also seeing trends in the market evolving due to this reason. One of the biggest trends that has been observed in the shopping department is that retail is almost dead right now and that most people prefer to buy online due to the risk of virus. While it must be noted that wholesale retail like Walmart and other malls are still doing well, the single retail shops have almost shut down completely.
This is to say that the important of e-commerce is more than ever and most of the people are told to move from single retail to e-commerce as soon as possible. However, the problem is that we are also facing an economic crisis meaning that spending on ads and other stuff is unlikely to happen. For that reason, Google announced they will be offering free product listings on their platform’s shopping tab. But now, Google has made an even better announcement which is that these free product listings will not be limited to the shopping tab but also come to the main Google Search results.
The company also says that if you now search for a product on Google then you will see the free product listings instead of the ads for that product while the ads will be present but in a different section of the page. Google has said that their shift to free product listings instead of showing ads is “a way to aid businesses struggling to connect with shoppers due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic”. But some reports say that Google was under threat from Amazon and free listings is Google’s answer to that threat. Now, we will see how this affects Google’s ad revenue but it definitely good for e-commerce sellers.
