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Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

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21–30 of 257 posts

Re: Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

#21
I used to like buying with Google Checkout back in the day. And does anyone remember Froogle? They used to have free product listings, and then they started charging. One of the reasons I heard for that change was that they were getting a lot of spam.

I guess by partnering with Shopify they can let someone else worry about that, but likely they'll have a counterfeit problem if this gets any traction.

Re: Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

#23
Could they just bring back froogle already?

If it’s free to list, why not just make a special shopping filter on google to find stuff for sale. Amazon included.

I miss the day when I could google for products and find the best price quality. Amazon search shows more ads than search results and the world really needs a shopping google.

Re: Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

#26

Free until they dominate the entire market

Or wipe out the low commission fee competition in the payment processor space. If the US had better anti-competitive enforcement I feel like this is akin to the Internet Explorer/Netscape/Microsoft case, in them using one monopoly (search) to take over another market (same hook too: "free"). Plus you know they're going to reward sites for using this in their search rankings (or just outright place them at the top).

Look like they aren't doing payment processing. They're partnering with Paypal and Shopify. So by "commission-free" that would mean the commission on top of payment processing?

Re: Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

#27

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 204 times, shame on me. https://killedbygoogle.com/

Slashdot.org was plagued by people posting "first post" to every story, so they implemented an automatic "first post" comment to each article, that was removed as soon as other comments appeared. Maybe this comment ("Google will shut this down like so many other products") should be similarly posted automatically to Hacker News on every Google story?

Re: Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

#28

Free until they dominate the entire market

You really think Google -- who has floundered in this space for years -- is going to dominate a market that is already dominated by a company (Amazon) with a 50% larger market cap?

Walmart and Target have been trying to chip away at Amazon's lead, and they're only getting buried deeper in the dust. Google doesn't exactly have a reputation for entering new markets and dominating them, either...

Re: Buy on Google is now open and commission-free

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just glad there's someone to temper Amazon from world dominance... For now.

At first, me too. But amazon doesn't have a search monopoly, millions of android devices, google maps, or youtube to drive the sales. Neither do they have the huge amount of data google already have on people. Now there is a possibility that google fails because sales require a lot of IRL stuff they suck at. So maybe it will be a balanced game. But if they win, it's going to be a nightmare. Unrelated, but I'm also qu…

> But amazon doesn't have a search monopoly, millions of android devices, google maps, or youtube to drive the sales.

Don't forget that something like ~70% of their income comes from AWS. They may not be as visible as Google on the net but they are pretty much the largest provider of web services.

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