Google's Shopping Service to List User's Local Stores
Google executives said last night that the company planned to move quickly to capitalize on its new Google Base database service, adding a feature that lets merchants provide local shopping information.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Base launched a day earlier as a repository intended to distribute submitted material across Google Search, Froogle, and Google Local. Its blog-import instructions signaled that Google was building intake mechanisms before extending the database to merchant-provided local shopping information.
The local-shopping addition turns Google Base from a general publishing repository into infrastructure for store inventory and location data, tying merchant submissions more directly to consumer search and shopping results.
First-order effects
- Merchants can submit local shopping information for inclusion in Google’s Shopping service, giving Google a structured source of store-level product and location data.
- Google’s Shopping service gains a local-store layer, linking its search and shopping surfaces more tightly with Google Base submissions.
Second-order effects
- Retailers that want visibility in Google’s shopping results face a new incentive to maintain product and local-store data in Google’s submission system rather than relying only on their own websites.
- Google can make its shopping results more useful for location-specific purchase intent as merchant-supplied records supplement information gathered from the open web.
Third-order effects
- If merchants adopt the submission model, product discovery shifts further from indexing retailer pages toward platforms that collect, normalize, and distribute structured merchant data across multiple search services.
The trend: Google is using Google Base to turn merchant-submitted structured data into a shared layer for search, shopping, and local discovery.