7 Takeaways eCom Brands Need to Know About the New Google Shopping

This month, Google announced a revamp to Google Shopping. For now, it’s only released in the U.S. but as with all Google roll-outs, once it’s up and running, it’ll be in the UK very quickly.

Here is the full ‘official’ announcement.

We’ve had some hands on experience of using the new Shopping and below are our honest thoughts to date.

From a broader perspective my personal take on this is I believe Google is attempting to make the Google Shopping tab a destination in itself (similar to Google Images + Maps) this way it free’s the main Search results to be more chat-like and AI powered for non-commercial terms to offer a similar experience to ChatGPT + Perplexity. We also discuss this in more detail on our podcast.

The need for this is further supported by Google announcing the a 1.5x increase in search terms with 5 or more words. Signalling how users needs are becoming way more specific and from the use of AI models, more longer form chat like searches. Source here.

Visually More Appealing

It’s essentially a performance-enhanced PLP within Google.

It’s a page you actually want to browse and interact with, vs the old view which is just a feed of products with 0 segmentation or content.

Brand Power (...or Not)

Here’s one of our US clients that are seen as ‘the’ authority for washable rugs.

Google is leveraging their brand name on the homepage of the Shopping results.

When I click into this, I’m met with a generic ‘washable rugs’ SERP.

When I then finally click on a Ruggable result, I’m met with multiple other retailers ranked by price. Luckily in this example Ruggable has solid reviews and is cheaper than its resellers.

Pro: Ruggable seen as the authority in washable rugs topic.

Con: Your brand is helping other (likely cheaper alternatives) get exposure to a buyer with high intent

Also, from a brand perspective, you’ll see the only place your logo is visible is via your favicon. Which I guess is still a level up from the Google Shopping ads where it’s just your brand name in text no image!

Affiliate & PR

What’s evident is when you do get to a PDP pop up, the affiliate / comparison websites are shown, making them way more prominent at the end of the buyers journey.

It’s acting almost as a reinforcement or extra validation to buy this product, making PR and listicles even more important part of an eCommerce strategy.

Race To The Bottom

When you click a product, you’re met with a feed of resellers of this product. See below:

This new interface strongly resembles Amazon's approach. The focus shifts away from brand identity toward individual products, creating a price-driven marketplace where the lowest price often wins. For brands with resellers, this poses a challenge—resellers can easily undercut your prices and capture sales through small discounts.

There’s also a section near the search bar that allows you to filter for ‘deals’ further emphasising a price focused shopping experience:

This is a summary of what’s happening here:

You build your brand, and customers search for it.

Google then shows customers other similar products, yet they persist and try to purchase directly from your brand.

At this point, Google displays your product from other sellers—often with lower prices, faster delivery, or better reviews.

During this process, you're hit twice: first by paying Google for brand-related ad clicks, then by losing sales to resellers offering lower prices.

Free vs. Ads

As expected, the sponsored feed is right at the top. There are also multiple others throughout the page scroll.

Google’s made this page way more engaging so the more people stay on these pages and browse within Google the more ad impressions Google can serve from a single search.

I also noticed quite a lot of the products within the actual product feed referencing ‘cpc’ in their UTM codes. It’s not clear if this is an error on the brands side OR if Google is showing ads within the product feed itself and not actually specifying they are ads (based on Google’s reputation i’m going with the latter).

See Zappos below:

Images Are So Important

Just by looking at some of these screenshots, you can see how important your product images will be. Google is showing a combination of lifestyle and product, as expected.

The most interesting part is Google is auto-generating 3D renders of products.

You can take this in two ways:

1. I should do more 3D render images on site as Google (and therefore you’d hope) users clearly value them
2. I don’t need to do any 3D renders myself as Google will do them for me

I suspect your answer will be driven based on your resource.

Content Rich Results

In the launch page, Google showed PDP which rich content and video. I couldn’t replicate this so it maybe something that’s coming in the future. Based on the screenshot, you can see YouTube naturally being prioritised:

Further to this announcement, Google also announced that it will soon be launching purchases directly within the Google SERP results. So there is a chance users could browse, shop, compare and buy your products without ever visiting your website.

Overall, this redesign is a positive move that creates a much better user shopping experience. As mentioned earlier, Google appears to be positioning shopping as a standalone destination, such as images or maps, and this update marks significant progress toward that goal.

However, the race-to-bottom pricing approach is concerning, as is Google's increased reliance on brands while simultaneously diminishing their rewards through the reseller feed at the point of purchase. While I appreciate the addition of richer content in the product feed during the buying journey, there's a risk it could lower conversion rates by sending users back up the funnel to conduct more searches. This scenario benefits Google more than brands.

For now, the main actions for UK brands would be to ensure their feed is set up and optimised across merchant centre and manufacturer centre and to maximise schema as much as possible, where relevant.