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by tantalor 4038 days ago
Headline contradicts the story, which says the button will be added to the "shopping ads that appear alongside search results", not the search results themselves. Big difference.

(I work for Google)

3 comments

A large number of people can't tell ads from search result, so the difference isn't that big in in practice.

I am really interested in how this is going to work. Unless the buy button sends people directly to a reseller Google is going to drown in customer support. Trying to make customer understand that despite you buying this one Google, you didn't buy it from Google is going to be VERY tricky. Likewise handling returns could be a major pain.

From the business side I just hope that payments are going to be more business friendly than PayPal.

A large number of people can't tell ads from search result, so the difference isn't that big in in practice.

In some cases this can be caused by the background colors chosen for ads being perfectly eliminated by cheap laptop LCDs at slight vertical angles. The pale yellow or blue completely disappears to white. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that A/B testing of colors stumbled upon the perfect color to disappear into a cheap LCD screen ;-).

Probably part of AdWords Shopping campaigns. The products are already uploaded to Google, why not add another field for direct cart link? Google sends the click there and gets a cut based on the existing AdWords tracking.

Seem quite easy to me and all the merchants would be on board.

So, is it kind of like this, where Google takes some of the profit and doesn't worry about whether the goods are pirated or not, because hey, profit!

http://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/37i2f4/someone_pirat...

Or... are you still "good" Google? Is this guy getting any help from Google yet?

The buy button goes to the retailers checkout and not to Google saving one click.

How is this any different that the link to the product and you than hit purchase. I fail to see the "Evil" in this.

Read the story.
I did read the story. The purchase is the stores purchase minus the click to the checkout box.
I'm talking about the story I linked, where someone is selling a pirated copy of an author's book on Google Play. Google is happily collecting a portion of the proceeds on the pirated book, while refusing to remove the pirated book from the marketplace. So.. not cool.