E-Commerce is the future of retail businesses, but it can be immensely challenging too. Leveraging the right eCommerce software that offers all the necessary features to manage an eCommerce business on a unified platform can help businesses save time, conserve resources, enhance efficiency, earn customer loyalty, and boost profits. Google Shopping is already a prominent name in eCommerce platforms globally. Moreover, Google is now all set to re-create a free eCommerce marketplace for merchants with many new exciting features introduced in 2022. With these advancements, the Google eCommerce Marketplace will revolutionize and dominate the eCommerce market worldwide.
The News:
- Studies indicate that the online segment (eCommerce) will expand to a quarter of the total global retail sales by 2025.
- There are more than 2.14 billion digital buyers worldwide.
- 50% of online shoppers claim that images helped them decide what to buy.
- Studies indicate that 50% of US shoppers are less likely to buy something online if the checkout process takes more than 30 seconds.
- Global retail eCommerce sales will reach USD 6.4 trillion in 2024; by 2025, retail eCommerce sales worldwide are predicted to reach USD 7.4 trillion.
- According to Statista Global Consumer Survey, there will be 291 million online shoppers in the US by 2025; consequently, the US retail eCommerce market will reach a revenue of USD 1.3 trillion by 2025.
- 41% of shoppers make purchases daily or weekly using their mobiles/smartphones.
- According to Statista, eCommerce losses to online payment fraud were estimated at 20 billion U.S. dollars globally in 2021 itself.
- 79% of consumers would be more likely to buy online if the merchant ensures fraud protection.
- The global eCommerce software market size will reach USD 20.19 billion by 2028.
- Google Shopping removed the commission fees, remarkably reducing costs for retailers.
- Google will dominate the eCommerce market with its new features.
How did we get here?
#1. The Challenges That E-Commerce Merchants Commonly Face
- Ever-increasing competition in the eCommerce market.
- Managing product content/descriptions is complex and involves enormous time and resources.
- To lead among numerous competitors in the market, eCommerce businesses must provide an enhanced and personalized customer experience.
- Providing better search options to customers is challenging but necessary to increase business and satisfy shoppers.
- Merchants need the latest search engine optimization (SEO) tools in the eCommerce systems for better reach and to stay ahead of the competition.
- A lengthy, multistep checkout process frustrates customers and leads to shopping cart abandonment.
- Customers prefer varied modes of payment and expect the eCommerce platforms to offer multiple payment methods or options to match their preferences.
- The eCommerce platform must support scalability for steady business growth.
- For smoother business operations, merchants need eCommerce systems to seamlessly integrate with many other existing systems, including payment gateways.
- Customers vastly prefer mobile shopping, and the eCommerce platform needs to be compatible with mobile devices.
- Businesses need to manage volumes of data, including customer information and other sensitive data; manual data management can result in data loss.
- Data security and fraud issues result in permanent damages to business reputation.
- Reliable eCommerce software tools can solve numerous challenges, but their costs upset the business budget.
Adopting the right eCommerce solutions, including Google eCommerce Marketplace, can help businesses solve these challenges. So, let’s understand the key features and offerings of the top eCommerce software.
#2. What Are the Necessary Tools to Look For in E-Commerce Software?
Here are the must-have features of reliable eCommerce software.
User-Friendly Interface
The eCommerce system must offer a user-friendly interface for merchants and shoppers. The tools and interface must be easy to learn and utilize. It should provide smooth navigation for an enhanced user experience.
Content Management
A perfect eCommerce system must enable various content management tools for product descriptions, images, videos, and more. Moreover, it should provide templates to help the sellers/merchants create better product content in less time and enhance efficiency.
Customer Engagement
Customer engagement tools are also a must-have in eCommerce software. These tools include search, wishlist, sort & filter, product recommendations, social media sharing, live chat integration, and more.
Order Tracking
E-Commerce systems are incomplete without order management and point-of-sale tools. The merchants and the customers should be able to easily access comprehensive details of the order and transactions from the eCommerce platform. Without appropriate order tracking tools, merchants cannot access detailed data and solve customer queries for the orders, and customers will lose trust in the brand.
Marketing Tools
The ideal eCommerce platform must offer marketing features, including SEO tools for better customer reach and personalized email features for the marketing team to connect with the customers. Additionally, the platform should support user-generated content (UGC) and customer reviews or allow integrations with such tools. The software must also enable analytics and insights on the customer journey and user experience for informed decision-making.
Integrations
The eCommerce software must allow seamless integrations with all the critical systems, including payment gateways, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and more.
Customer Support Tools
Customers are the crux of eCommerce businesses. To help businesses provide flawless customer services, eCommerce software must enable customer support features, including phone support, email support, chatbots, live chat, and more.
Analytics and Reporting
Not just customer insights, eCommerce businesses require in-depth analytics and reporting features in the eCommerce software to estimate market trends, changing needs, their performance, return on investment, user behavior, and more and take appropriate action for improvement.
Other Useful Tools
The eCommerce software must support multiple payment options for varied customer preferences. It must also enable multi-lingual and multi-currency support to help businesses expand to broader markets.
#3. New Features in the Google E-Commerce Marketplace
Winning customers’ attention and trust is the ultimate way of achieving success in eCommerce. Thus, every merchant wants an enhanced customer experience to gain customer loyalty and stay ahead of the competition. Google understands this, so Google Shopping is adding many innovative tools in 2022 to help merchants improve the customer journey and acquire and retain more customers. So, here are the new offerings.
Enhanced Search
Google eCommerce marketplace now offers numerous enhancements in search tools. These tools would make the search easier without merchants needing to add complex product descriptions to get their products noticed. Google Shopping will also allow visual-first results on apparel queries from trusted brands and retailers. Moreover, shoppers will get recommendations from lifestyle magazines, video reviews, blogs, etc. This improved search function would enable shoppers to discover a more extensive range of products and brands from search.
Besides, shoppers can easily leverage the “multisearch” tool to find the products they are looking for. With this feature, shoppers can search products by taking a screenshot (or photo) and ask a question (search query) about the product to find similar products; for example, take a picture of one’s sofa set and add the query “brown” to get a similar sofa set in brown color. This feature is particularly useful when the customers or shoppers cannot precisely describe what they are looking for.
Another significant enhancement in Google eCommerce is the 3-dimensional (3D) and augmented reality (AR) experience in search. These tools will enable brands to enhance shoppers’ buying confidence by improving the shopping experience. Shoppers will now be able to get a real-like view of the products from different angles and interact with the product through AR like in a real environment. Moreover, merchants or manufacturers can easily leverage this valuable feature by just adding 3D content feeds through the “Manufacturer Center.”
Web to App Connect
Merchants can now take the customers directly to their app from Google Shopping, mobile search, or YouTube Ads if they have the merchants’ app installed on their devices with the new Web to App Connect feature in Google eCommerce.
This tool makes it extremely easy for merchants to direct the customers to the relevant pages and also helps merchants identify the URLs to be deep linked. Moreover, this tool enables merchants to estimate the revenue impact of deep linking and measure app conversions more effectively.
Highly Visual Ad Experiences
The enhanced visual experience is not just for organic search results, Google eCommerce will soon allow advertisers to present highly visual shopping Ads for US customers in dedicated Ad slots spread across the page.
Moreover, Google plans to roll out additional enhancements, including innovative, better ways to present multiple product images and product information, including product descriptions, availability, and reviews for shopping Ads in the US.
Product Feeds Extending to YouTube Shorts and YouTube Search
Merchants can now leverage the benefits of product feeds on YouTube Shorts and YouTube Search. It will enable merchants to showcase their best product images to short-form content viewers in YouTube Shorts and get noticed by potential customers looking for their next video on YouTube Search.
New Loyalty Features
Google eCommerce has further introduced new loyalty features to help merchants better showcase their loyalty program and loyalty benefits to US shoppers, including free shipping offers, deals, and loyalty points to attract new members. Merchants can now integrate their loyalty programs within the Merchant Center, enabling existing program members to view the loyalty benefits with the free listings.
Besides, advertisers will be able to attract new loyalty members using Performance Max campaigns for online sales with a product feed. When the merchants or advertisers upload the loyalty list, the Customer Match tool will ensure that the loyalty programs explicitly targeted for potential new loyalty members appear to “only” these customers.
Insights Reporting for Free Listings and Product Offers
Google eCommerce enhancements of 2022 enable merchants in-depth insights on free product listings’ performance. This new insights reporting feature provides a report on total traffic and conversions on the merchants’ product listings. Additionally, merchants now get price insights to understand where their pricing stands compared to the competitors on the search engine results pages (SERP).
Google Shopping will soon allow merchants to optimize the performance of their product offers and spot inactive offers in shopping campaigns. These detailed product offers’ insights will help the merchants enhance their feeds to improve overall performance.
Shopping Experience Scorecard
Google has introduced a new Shopping Experience Scorecard in the Merchant Center to reward merchants who offer exceptional customer service. This program, meant for merchants who opt for free listings in the US, is introduced to encourage the merchants to enhance their customer experience.
Through the Shopping Experience Scorecard, Google will reward the deserving merchants through a badge, a boost in ranking, and many such benefits that will enable merchants to get noticed and earn more customers.
Quicker Checkout Directly From Merchant Site
A faster checkout process immensely benefits eCommerce merchants. GoodFirms' research indicates that a lengthy checkout process is the most significant cause of cart abandonment. Understanding this fact, another improved feature that Google now offers for Google Shopping customers is a quicker checkout for shoppers directly from the merchant site instead of a multi-step checkout process.
With this feature, the buyers can now directly go from Google to the merchant sites’ checkout system with their selected product saved in the shopping cart. This feature ensures shoppers a smoother buying journey and user experience, increasing eCommerce sales.
What’s Next
As rightly quoted by Jean Paul Agon,
“eCommerce isn’t the cherry on the cake, it is the new cake.”
E-Commerce has transformed retail businesses globally. Retailers who do not adopt eCommerce will soon be left behind in the race. Businesses now realize this and are rapidly switching to eCommerce to grow their business. However, it is essential to choose the right eCommerce tools to sustain your eCommerce business amid the ever-growing market competition.
Google’s eCommerce platform is already a market leader among the best eCommerce platforms. Google Shopping is free for merchants and offers all the features of the top eCommerce business solutions. Now, Google has introduced many more features in the Google eCommerce Marketplace to make it further convenient and lucrative for businesses. Leverage these ingenious features and gain an astonishing edge over the market.
