Google Shopping Launched in India, Brings a New Search Experience

Google has announced the official launch of Google Shopping in India. The new search experience is designed to surface offers from various retailers on products across various categories.

Visit the Google Shopping home page from India and you will see a carousel of products that Google believes will be relevant to the user. Apart from currently trending products, you will see products from different categories, top deals, and more. Scroll down further and you will have the opportunity to browse categories like phones, clothing, books, watches, and more.

Search for a product on Google search and a new 'Shopping' tab will show up in results, next to News, Maps, Videos, and Books etc. Visit the Shopping tab and users will have the chance to explore results from merchants - big and small - to compare prices and complete their purchase.

In the Shopping tab, you will have the ability to filter out products based on brand, whether they are on sale, and other criteria using the "filter chips" on top.

Visit the page of a specific product, and you will see prices from various online stores where this product is available. Google currently shows prices from online merchants, with plans to expand this to offline stores as well at a later stage. This will be done by providing retailers access to Merchant Centre, which will let them make their product feed available to Google.

For India, Google is making the Merchant Centre available in Hindi as well. Google Shopping results will also be available in English as well as Hindi.

The Google Shopping experience will be available on both mobile and desktop as well as via a Progressive Web App (PWA).

Google says there's no revenue share arrangement with the participating vendors. Instead, they can use Product Listing Ads on Google search to promote their products, a revenue opportunity for the search giant.

Google Lens will integrate with Google Shopping, so if you click a product in the real world using Google Lens, you will see relevant results that will let you find and purchase same/ similar products.

Google says the idea behind Google Shopping is to increase the number of users who make purchases online. Though India has over 400 million Internet users, Google says only one-third of them have ever made a purchase online. This includes those who've bought, say, a train ticket online, and ones those who've made a retail transaction online are even fewer.

With Google Shopping, the company also aims to bring a larger share of India's 58 million small-and-medium business (SMBs) online.

In a blog post, Surojit Chatterjee, Vice President - Product Management, Google Shopping, said, "At Google, our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful to everyone. That's why today we are bringing a new and exciting shopping search experience to India. This is a personalised and immersive experience that will help you easily filter through offers, review prices from multiple retailers and find that right product."