Google India launches a new shopping search experience

Google today unveiled a new and immersive shopping search experience for Indian users. The new personalised experience will allow users to easily filter through offers, review prices from multiple retailers and find the products they are looking for.

This experience is available across several products: a made-to-browse experience on the Shopping home page, the Shopping tab on Google Search and in Google Lens. For retailers, Google has expanded the Merchant Center to Hindi.

The new ‘Shopping Homepage’ is a made-to-browse destination for shoppers to search across multiple product categories, and browse products from thousands of retailers. To make the shopping experience richer, smart features like price drops and a collection of the most popular products on Google have been added. The experience will also be available as a Progressive Web App (PWA) for users with entry level phones.

The ‘Shopping Tab’ in Google Search will allow users to post queries in Hindi and English and show product lists, local store inventory and review prices from across multiple retailers.

Finally, Style Search in Google Lens is an all-new visual approach to find products such as clothes, furniture, and home decor, by simply pointing the Lens app.

Talking about the launch of the new experience, Surojit Chatterjee, Vice President - Product Management, Google said, “More than 40 million Indians are coming online every year, and search is an integral part of their online journey. From seasoned desktop shoppers to first-time users with entry-level smartphones, we hope this new shopping experience will make finding what people are looking for just a little bit easier.”

For retailers, Merchant Center has always been the place to upload store and product data for Shopping ads. So far, the Merchant Center has been only available in English, and starting today it is expanding to Hindi. Retailers can now also use Merchant Center to upload product details so they can appear across Google, without paying for ad campaigns.

Speaking about the offerings for retailers, Surojit said, “With this launch, our aim is to support the entire retail ecosystem, from shopping sites and large retailers to small local shops, and give them the tools, technology and scale to thrive in today’s digital economy.”

According to the Sixth Economic Census, there are 58 million SMBs in India of which 35 percent are engaged in retail trade. However, a very small number of them have an online presence -- clearly highlighting a huge opportunity for retailers to surface their merchandize to the millions of online consumers.