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16/12/2018

Google Launches Shopping Service In The Booming Indian Market




Google Launches Shopping Service In The Booming Indian Market
With the aim of gaining advantage of the booming digital economy of India, its own shopping aggregator service has been launched in India by Google.
 
The US tech giant has introduced the a new "shopping" tab on its search engine, its image recognition app Google Lens, a mobile-friendly web app and the Google Shopping home page in India which would allow its Indian users to be able to easily browse more deals on Google.
 
Users are allowed to conduct extensive searches for deals on a wide range of products available from numerous retailers with the help of Google's shopping tools. According to media reports citing sources with knowledge of the matter, Google Shopping will list Amazon and Walmart-owned largest Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart among many other retailers.
 
"India has the second largest population of internet users in the world, and it's only getting bigger," Surojit Chatterjee, vice president of product management at Google Shopping, said in a blog post Thursday. "While 400 million Indians are online today, less than one out of three buy things online."
 
To enable more Indian users to search on Google, the search engine would present results in both English and Hindi. The revenues earned by Google form this service is from shopping is from the advertising costs for merchants.
 
Increased internet penetration, reduced costs of internet surfing and lower priced smatphones has seen the Indian e-commerce scene and its digital economy boon in recent year – aided by the huge more than 1.3 billion population of the country. This has seen the rise of a number of online giants in India such as Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm. India's e-commerce market could be valued at $150 billion by 2022, according to research by Indian software industry body Nasscom and consultant PwC.
 
Apart from Google, Amazon has also made big investments in its business in India. Last year, the company ventured into the brick and mortar retailing sphere with taking up equity stake in local rival Shoppers Stop and according to reports, is also planning to invest in Future Retail by taking up a stake in the company. Amazon has also joined hands with private equity firm Samara Capital and acquired controlling stake in More retail chain – a brick and mortar retailing brands of Aditya Birla Group in September.
 
With 100 million users and 100,000 merchants on its platform, the largest Indian e-commerce platform in India is Flipkart which was acquired by Walmart in May. This acquisition by Walmart is indicative of the strategy of the largest retailer of the world of ultimately entering the Indian e-commerce market and of expansion of its toe hold in the country.
 
The European Union has however been critical of the shopping service of Google and the US tech firm was last year fined by EU regulators of 2.4 billion euros or $2.7 billion because of alleged violation of antitrust regulations. According to the EU, consumers in Europe were denied the option of choices of service by Google because the users of Google search engine were automatically directed to its shopping platform.
 
(Source:ww.cnbc.com)

Christopher J. Mitchell

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