Google will now highlight discounts in its continued e-comm push

Google is still on the hunt. In its latest move to become an e-comm destination, the tech giant today announced it will highlight discounts in its Shopping tab.

• A designated deals tab will be added to search in October for major sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Deals on deals: Searches for “discount code” are up 50% from 2020, noted Matt Madrigal, Google’s VP and GM of merchant shopping, in a blog post. So while people are eager to spend, they’re still watching their wallets.

• A July 2020 survey found that coupons or discounts would motivate 61% of shoppers to try a new brand, and more than half said it could spark an impulse purchase.

On a spree: Google’s been making its own shopping deals lately, too. In the last few months, it announced partnerships with Shopify, Square, WooCommerce, and GoDaddy to incorporate more merchants into search. (And don’t forget its new IRL store in New York City.)

Google, which says it sees more than a billion shopping sessions a day, seems agnostic about where people actually click “buy”—whether its own platform or a brand’s site.

“We are not the retailer,” Bill Ready, president of commerce and payments at Google, told Bloomberg in May. “We have no aspirations to be the retailer.” But it does want to be the place that drives those purchases.

• It won’t be easy. Most US consumers still start their online shopping journey on Amazon (53%) vs. a search engine like Google (23%), per an August 2020 report.—GT