In India, in February 2021, Google cornered 36% of UPI transactions and has most recently announced a partnership with Wise and Western Union to go into the remittance business through Google Pay. Furthermore, Mastercard just announced a partnership with Google's Waze to help farmers grow by putting them on the map.
On the heels of the above, Google announced a new partnership with Shopify to transform users online shopping experience by making it easier for people to discover smaller brands and local mom-and-pop stores.
Google is working with Shopify, a firm that makes it easy for people to start an online store. Google hopes to achieve this feat.
E-commerce for the past 15 years has had a concentrating effect. "The vast majority of growth over the last decade has come from a handful of very large e-commerce players." Bill Ready, Google's president of commerce and payments
Ultimately, this playbook will deliver an end-to-end customer experience for users and would integrate the shopping, AI, ML and payment services that Google has developed over the years. Such technologies include the Google Lens feature that allows you to search an image on Google Photos. This partnership will enable users to identify a product and search for merchants selling the product and pay using Google Pay.
This partnership also complements Google's efforts earlier this year to pilot-test a new experience on YouTube that allows users to shop products they learn about from their favourite creators.
Google's e-commerce offerings go head-on with similar playbooks from TikTok and Facebook and their investments interests in e-commerce.
As part of this partnership, Shopify will help create a simple process for 1.7 million merchants on the platform to feature their products on Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Images. The implication here is that products offered by tiny businesses will be easier to find on Google.
There is a revenue opportunity as brands can subscribe to Google Ads to promote their listings, so they appear higher up in the search rankings than an icon that identifies them as an ad.
