Global ecommerce company, Shopify, has expanded its partnership with Google. This will enable Shopify’s more than 1.7 million sellers to have access to a much broader range of Google’s platforms and will mean Shopify products will now be discoverable to more consumers across Search, Shopping, Images, Maps and YouTube.
The expansion comes as Google and Shopify ramp up their efforts to compete against Amazon in e-commerce. Amazon has increasingly been eating into Google’s most important business – search advertising. Google’s advertising business, including YouTube, accounted for 81% of Alphabet’s $56.9bn in fourth-quarter sales. However, Amazon is increasingly competing with Google on search ads for commercial queries.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a leading commerce company that provide the tools to help a retail business of any size start, grow and market themselves. They also provide secure, reliable site hosting for your website. Shopify currently powers over 1.7 million businesses in more than 175 countries.
Google introduced free listings for Shopping in April 2020, which helped to build out the increase in merchants on its platform. This change was in order to gain Shopify volume in searchable products.
What changes will the partnership with Google bring?
As a part of the partnership, Shopify will use Google Cloud’s global infrastructure to give shoppers a more personalised, engaging experiences, including:
- Google Cloud’s network of 25 regions and 76 availability zones around the world will provide lower latency and higher reliability, allowing Shopify to provide a fast, highly-available service to sellers around the world.
- Google Cloud’s services will assist Shopify in meeting various regulatory, security, and compliance requirements, which vary region-to-region and country-to-country.
- Labelled as the ‘cleanest cloud in the industry’, Google Cloud will also help Shopify reduce its carbon footprint and achieve the company’s sustainability goals.
Additionally, Shopify will join Google Cloud’s Partner Advantage program, enabling the two companies to partner on joint go-to-market initiatives, bringing Shopify’s ecommerce platform to more businesses around the world.
Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering at Shopify, has commented;
“Our partnership with Google Cloud will mean that more Shopify merchants around the world have access to competitive computing technologies that would otherwise only be available to enterprise brands…We know that during the COVID-19 pandemic from mid-March to mid-Sept, 84% of consumers have shopped online. Improved store speed and performance will give our merchants a competitive edge by allowing them to better serve buyers where they are, and it will do so in the most energy efficient way possible through Google Cloud.”
James Lambe, Managing Director of Google Cloud, comments;
“Shopify is trusting Google Cloud to help the company scale across the globe, allowing its merchants to handle peak traffic at any time of the year…Over the last three years, we’ve worked with Shopify engineering to ensure its business can scale as it continues to experience rapid growth. We’re thrilled to continue on this journey together.”
How will this benefit online sellers?
In a nutshell, this development will make Shopify seller’s products more discoverable across various platforms and properties, including the likes of Google Maps, search images, Youtube and Lens, with just a few clicks.
Alongside the expansion with Shopify, Google has also informed advertisers that its Shopping Graph would now begin to pull information from websites, price reviews, videos and more to better inform online shoppers about how and where to find items, how well they were received, and which seller has the best price.
See the video below on Google Smart Shopping:
Another feature of the campaign includes when someone views screenshots of products in Google Photos, they will now see a suggestion to search the photo using Google Lens to help find the item for sale.
Google is not the only ecommerce partner for Shopify. The company also has partnered with Facebook, Pinterest, Walmart and others.
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