Google To Launch Deals Site?
I’ve been pushing the shopping engines, including Google Shopping, to talk about deals for years. The economy stinks and shopping engines can easily push bargains and savings. And many have done so. Yahoo! Shopping did this really early on. Become, Pronto, PriceGrabber, and the rest followed. But Google is still a holdout in that they don’t allow a merchant to submit a Sale Price in addition to a Regular Price, and thus allow a consumer to see a 10% off, 20% off, or 25% off sticker/star.
Deals. You hear about a hot new daily deal site every day. It’s hard to keep track. I used DailyCandy back in the day…and today the company launched DailyCandy Stylish alerts for Android (only for NYC). I’ve used Woot off and on for years…and now that it’s an Amazon company, expect to see Woot leverage Amazon’s relationship with millions of sellers (and buyers, of course). Twitter is experimenting with @earlybird. Groupon and the hundreds (is it thousands?) of clones around the country and around the world are the darlings of the media and the talk of the town. And for a good reason. Groupon is an incredible business making a boatload of money.
Deals. Everyone wants them. Online or offline, we want deals, steals, free shipping, bargains, and more. Check out Google Trends for Daily Deals or Coupons. Just as Amazon will move into a category that’s performing well, Google will look at what people are searching for and make sure they can provide the right answer and monetize the result. Why do you think they’re gearing up for games? The growth of Facebook gaming sites like playdom and zynga is incredible. Google sees this and makes a move or 2.
If Google’s goal is to organize the worlds information, they’re kinda letting us all down on deals. Sure, I can search for ‘deals’ on Google, but I get 1000s of so-so coupon sites that Google has already dinged on Google AdWords for basically being duplicate content. And there’s no specific deal information for the 20M uniques who use Google Shopping each month. It’s only a matter of time until Google gets into the game itself. Just as they’ve entered shopping or health or finance or travel, Google will jump on the bandwagon and offer a deals site…maybe they’ll buy one as well, but I’m sure they can easily do it themselves. Google already has relationships with 100s of 1000s of online and offline business. I’m going to table the discussion of Google launching a Groupon clone for now and just concentrate on an online daily deal site like a Woot, but on sterioids.
Google Merchant Center recently introduce the Featured Product attribute. The Google Merchant Center Featured Product Attribute is “Used to indicate that this item is a special, featured product; for instances, items on promotion or featured in a sale or circular,” according to Google.
I estimate that there are about 60K-90K active merchants submitting data feeds to Google Merchant Center (Google doesn’t publish this number, so this is a guestimation). Imagine if Google starts tapping into this merchant base for deals, or as they call them, featured products. They’ll have to start classifying these Featured Products better – sale, coupon available, rebate available, in-store special, etc. – but it’s easy to see an extremely powerful deal site start to develop without much work on Google’s part. Merchants are already providing Google Merchant Center with a lot of structured data (UPCs, titles, descriptions, images, prices, etc.) that most daily deal sites or coupon sites would kill to have or currently beg to have through the affiliate networks like CJ and Linkshare (super-affiliates need to work with data feeds from merchants as opposed to banners, buttons, and basic links). Google Shopping already has all this data. Just as they’ve started to publish merchant offers and take a cut of the transaction through Product Listing Ads, they can do the same for deals.
Google Deals. Has a nice ring to it.
But for Google, especially with commerce related activites, it’s not about a new property, it’s about leveraging structured data to enhance Search, AdWords, Mobile, Checkout, etc. So expect featured products to show up on Google Deals, but also on Google Shopping, attached to Google AdWords ads, and sprinkled everywhere else. If I worked at Google, I’d start pusing Google Deals OneBox results for searches like ‘Xbox coupon’ or ‘digital camera deal’ just in time for the holiday shopping season.
