Another year, another data point showing Amazon has surpassed Google as the default search engine for shopping.
55 percent of online shoppers start their product searches on Amazon
Google who?
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Fifty-five percent of people in the U.S. now start their online shopping trips on Amazon.com, according to results from a 2,000-person survey commissioned by the e-commerce startup BloomReach. That stat marks a 25 percent increase from the same survey last year, when 44 percent of online shoppers said they turned to Amazon first.
Over the same time, the percentage of shoppers who start product searches on search engines like Google dropped from 34 percent to 28 percent. The number of online shoppers who check out a retailer’s website (other than Amazon) first also shrunk, from 21 percent to 16 percent.
The trend is obviously bad news for traditional retailers like Walmart and Target, which have both made big, recent executive changes on their digital teams amid stalling growth in the face of Amazon.
But Amazon’s growing dominance is also an obvious problem for Google, which makes a fortune from selling ads alongside product searches.
The one potential silver lining for Google: As fewer shoppers go directly to a retailer’s website, these businesses have to find new ways to get in front of shoppers. One option: They are turning to Google’s image-heavy product listing ads to do that.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
