Amazon vs. Google...

by Chris Dixon

There's lots of buzz in the media about the "Marketplace War" between eBay and Amazon, the "Search War" between Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the "Mobile War" between Google and Apple.

Today, serial entrepreneur Chris Dixon shines light on the real potential loser from Amazon's dominance - Google.

We've long thought at ChannelAdvisor that it is interesting that Google has taken their eye off of the core business. It's somewhat reminiscent of eBay's focus from 01-08 on all things 'not eBay': China, Skype, etc. which left the core marketplace business atrophied and open to competition from Amazon.

Google gets approximately 40% of its revenue from the 'retail' vertical, yet since Google Checkout (atrophied), hasn't done anything to really innovate in the vertical. In the meantime, Amazon has created the best product search engine which is gobbling up share hand over fist. Sooner or later consumers will stop using Google to start the search, and just use Amazon.

A couple of data points indicate this is already happening:

• Amazon's revenue is growing faster than Google on a y/y basis
• Amazon's traffic is growing faster than Google's
• For many customers that are on both Google (Adwords) and Amazon, Amazon's same-store-sales are growing much faster than Googles.

Perhaps with the appointment of Stephanie Tilenius as VP of e-commerce at Google, they realize this is a potential problem for them. Stephanie gave a talk at ChannelAdvisor's Catalyst recently and hinted at some big things to come. She also spoke in early June at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE for you home gamers) and the title of the talk was "Google enters the e-commerce arena".