Google eases online selling for small businesses on Shopify amid e-commerce push

The discoverability for merchants would be across Google Maps, Images, Lens, YouTube apart from Google Search.

Technology for MSMEs: Small businesses have been a big focus for Google much like every other technology corporation in the world. The company is now looking to enhance retail merchants’ experience of selling online through a deepened partnership with the e-commerce platform Shopify. The 1.7 million merchants globally selling on Shopify, which is also beginning to compete with the likes of Amazon and Flipkart in India, globally will now be able to make their products discoverable across Google “in just a few clicks,” Google announced during its I/O Development event.

The discoverability would be across Google Maps, Images, Lens, YouTube apart from Google Search. “Last year we made it free for merchants to sell their products on Google. Now, we’re introducing a new, simplified process that helps Shopify’s 1.7 million merchants make their products discoverable across Google in just a few clicks,” the company said in a blog post. However, it didn’t divulge further information beyond this.

Emails to Google and Shopify didn’t elicit an immediate reply for details about the partnership at the time of filing this report.

“Discovery is the first step in a product buying process that happens on an external platform maybe offline or online but not a company digital or physical asset apart from internal. Discoverability on e-commerce platforms is nowhere close to what Google has to offer in terms of the purchasability of a product. You may have to go through multiple pages to find one product you are looking for but that in itself makes a lot of difference if smaller platforms like Shopify starts integrating and partnering with Google. This discoverability is definitely going to boost a lot of merchants,” Arnav Gupta, an analyst at Forrester Research told Financial Express Online.

For shoppers to find shopping on Google more and more significant and easy, and attract sellers were perhaps among the reasons for the company to make selling cheaper for sellers across Google. It waived a commission fee in July last year for sellers participating in its Buy on Google checkout experience. The company had also earlier made it free for merchants to sell on Google, showing primarily free listings in search results on the Google Shopping tab. This was regardless of whether merchants advertise on Google. The tie-up with Shopify was also important for the company from this perspective. Importantly, Shopify had last year partnered with TikTok and Facebook to help its merchant base reach out to potential customers on the two platforms.

“As we eliminate barriers like fees and improve our technology, we’ve seen a 70 per cent increase in the size of our product catalog and an 80 per cent increase in merchants on our platform,” Google added. The company also showcased how its Shopping Graph – the real-time dataset about products, inventory, and merchants – studies product information, sellers, brands, and inventory data received from brands and retailers and based on online shopping sessions by customers, it connects shoppers people with over 24 billion listings from millions of merchants on the internet.