In 2018 Google had to deal with a lot of EU-fines, starting with a historical one of 2,42 billion in June for knowingly pushing its own shopping services unjust to smaller Comparison Shopping Services (CSS). They received another one for promoting their search engine predominantly for Android mobile devices (4,34 billion) and might receive a third one for, among other things, restricting search advertisements from Google’s competitors. Google’s response to some of these fines had mayor consequences for the Google advertising domain, fundamentally reshaping it.
What happened?
The first fine in particular caused a lot of upheaval within the Google advertising domain. The search engine established fairer competition by, initially, discounts on CPC (cost-per-click) and even refunds on advertisement budgets for CSS users. This caused a wave of new CSS-partners all hoping to profit from the mayor refunds and discounts handed out by Google. These CSS partner all sprang up within a couple of months, so it was not big surprise that a lot of them were put together rather hasty. Although Google stated that the discounts and refunds were going to be gradually phased out, new CSS partners kept coming. To detriment of consumers, webshops and benevolent CSS partners since the market is now swarmed with CSS’ers who were only there to join the ‘gold rush’. Accordingly, fourteen European CSS partners came together and send an open letter to European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager complaining about Google’s current approach within the shopping domain.
Last December 2018 Google finally announced new requirements for CSS partners, this time they were more stern. Among other things, CSS partners were required to have a filter-option which enables consumer to sort their products among various dimensions and the CSS partner is required to have a minimum of 100 webshop connections. Bigshopper, premium-partner from the first hour, was able to comply with Google’s new requirements by, among other things, taking over the smaller CSS’ers. This strategy has awarded the company to become one of the biggest European-wide CSS partners of their home country The Netherlands. This strategy and others decreased the number of CSS partners significantly, from 150 in January to 52 serious CSS partners at end of February in all of Europe.
The change
First of all, the experience with shopping ads will probably not change so much. Regardless of the CSS, it will remain a showreel of products on which consumers can click and land on a page of the respective webshop. However, the comparison services themselves could become a whole new thing. Currently, the competition between CSS partners is revolved around delivering the sweetest deal to the webshops. Some CSS partners might deliver their products in more EU countries than others, or some might be able to provide lower subscription fees. However, in the near future the competition is likely to be more revolved around UX. The CSS partners are just now starting to evolve, consider for instance the partners who do not have connections in all EU-countries. They will likely have them in the near future as it is a matter of time and acquiring more clients. Think about that for a second, if the competition is revolved around UX, what would be considered a good UX design to which webshops will decide to make a deal with the CSS partner? Probably the one who promises the highest revenue right? Consumers will associate certain CSS partners with certain industries, products or even experiences. Which means an extra layer is added at the consumer-psychological and -behavioural level. Providing marketeers with extra tools, or rather media, to persuade consumers to buy their products. As such, in the near future a good UX might mean a UX design which is pleasant to consumers but also more persuasive.
