Google Base - Heralding a New Era of e-Commerce

Google Base is extension of Google's effort to collect entire range of content. It enables content owners to make available their content online and searchable for free.

For listing an item, users can either select the item type or create new category for that item. Data can be uploaded using interactive user interface or through XML feeds. Google, reserves the right to remove any item. Once published, the item would appear on unique viewable url. Depending on the item category or type, an item may appear on Froogle or Google Local.

Almost any type of item or service can be posted here as data, software, music, photographs, used cars, or other material as article on any current topic. Items can be posted with attributes which would enable users to geo-locate and search them.

Google Base can also be highly useful for services such as students searching for colleges or universities, or for employers to advertise their open job positions to attract best talent. Google has not announced any plans for charging for listing on Google Base.

Pre-requisites for Listing

Presently for items to be listed at Google Base, all items and landing pages must be in English, site should be fully functional and not under construction, items should be freely viewable without any registration, site should be crawlable by Google-Bot, prices to be quoted in US Dollars and seller would commit to ship the products through out United States.

Type of items not permitted are adult goods; affiliate services; human body parts; items promoting violence based on race, religion or nationality; bulk marketing tools; child pornography; counterfeit items; drugs; gambling; hacking tools; virus and weapons etc.

How It Would Fare Versus Its Competition?

Google Base is presently in early stages of growth. Google Base has not only to compete with eBay but host of other regional players as well such as Alibaba in China which claims more than 10 million products listing on its web site. Among the players, it would have immediate impact on, are eBay, Craigslist and Microsoft's recently launched windows live expo etc. It is harbinger of many things to come such as enabling exchanges with merchants, video embedded chat, click to call etc. For example, someone searching for a product could find locations of sellers on a map and instantly ask sellers other related information as price and availability etc. It would make ads at Google Base more effective selling medium and merchants would not mind increasing their online ad budget.

eBay has many detractors. Google Base has already been touted as eBay killer. However, it may be premature to conclude any thing. As on now, it may help eBay as people would be able to post information about their auction on eBay at Google Base. eBay has a large community base, with established rules of buyers and sellers evaluating each other. This is not there presently in Google Base, though it may not be very far from it.

One thing is for sure that Google would be able to cut into eBay's pricing power. Eventually migration of traffic to Google Base would hit eBay and is likely to hit PayPal too.

Future of Google Base

With easy interface given to content owners to add products, it would enable small businesses who can not afford high fees of eBay and PayPal to promote sales of their online store. It appears that Google is heralding new era of ecommerce and Google Base appears to make a perfect fit in Google's master plan.

With such large range of categories of posting and the massive geo-tagged data base that would be generated, indeed on line shopping would never be same again. It remains to be seen whether this information develops as poorly structured information or well coordinated with other arms of Google as GTalk or GBuy etc. or whether it would be able to ward off hackers that would automate the listing of their merchandise on Google Base redirecting them to their own site.

One thing is for sure that Google is going to be a big brother on the net.