Google Officially Declares War Against Amazon, Rallies Smaller Retailers In Fight

It seems that the conflict between Amazon and Google has reached a crescendo, with the former constantly leveraging its position to deny the sale of the latter’s products. The search engine company finally had enough and has launched a new service specifically intended to help smaller online retailers combat the titanic presence of Jeff Bezos’ monster. Google basically sounded the horns of war.

The new feature is called Shopping Actions and it basically allows retailers to feature their products on Google’s search page directly or via Google Assistant, according to the announcement post. The advantage is better visibility for the shops while the tradeoff is that the search engine company gets a cut of every sale. Google was also quick to point out that this new feature does not affect organic searches.

“Shopping Actions uses a pay-per-sale model, meaning you only pay when a sale actually takes place. Shopping Actions appear within the sponsored Shopping Unit on the Google Search page, and on Google.com/Shopping. No organic rankings are impacted or changed,” the announcement reads.

Among the retailers that Google is targeting include Target, Walmart, and Home Depot, Reuters reports, which are not exactly small potato. These companies have struggled to keep up with Amazon’s seemingly unstoppable rise to power and their businesses have suffered as a result.

With this new service, traditional companies now have a chance to strike back at the disruptive online merchant giant that started out as nothing more than a bookstore. Shopping Actions will basically attempt to cut Amazon off from being the first choice of customers whenever they type such key phrases as “Where Can I Buy” and then followed by a product name.

According to analysts, in almost every case, the user would end up on Amazon. Now, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.