FIXZR

Both eBay & Amazon offer a vertical search engine that returns a list of things you can actually buy (or in eBay’s case, try and buy).  Yes they offer more than just listings, but this is more and more the case as their business models evolve.  The auction aspect of eBay is increasingly a niche legacy, and the move towards bigger brands, selling know-value-items, somwhat diminishes the value the Community adds. Amazon (arguably at the opposite end of the operations spectrum to eBay) is  seeing the value of opening up its portal, with it’s Marketplace offering letting you buy products from Amazon’s ‘competitors’. So if they’re vertical search engines, Google should be getting ready for the kill.

Imagine Rich Snippet listings of all the products available for sale on the web (with full ’sort by’ capabilities). Next to each item is a Google CheckOut ‘Buy Now’ button. Instead of remembering three names like Google, Amazon and eBay, you simply need to remember Google and check an ‘available for sale’ option at the top of your search results when you’re ready to buy. Google’s latest announcements at Searchology would seem to suggest that day may be coming sooner rather than later. Check out Google Squared as a way to present, order and manipulate the listings. And look into Resource Description Frameworks (Microformats) as the way Google will understand how to interpret and structure the product information.

So who will co-operate with Google’s vision for commerce? Product owners / manufacturers should love it, and all middlemen will fear it! Currently we all cooperate with Google, making our sites as SEO (Google SEO) friendly as possible - I imagine this will continue. Merchants don’t like site scrapping, unless Google is doing it, and microformats make site scrapping easy, fast and accurate. What is needed to grab the final bit of value from eBay’s Marketplace? A personal auction widget to manage bids perhaps. What is needed to grab the best of Amazon? Perhaps FedEx and TNT could buy their warehouse and shipping operations. There should be fun to be had as the big guys fight it out!