Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Tech writer Danielle Abril here, filling in for Adam.
The coronavirus has helped Amazon’s already massive e-commerce business skyrocket. Now another tech behemoth hopes it can get in on the action.
Google has spent the last 18 years trying—and failing—to become a major e-commerce player. You may recall Froogle, the company’s price comparison website that represented its first foray into the space in 2002. Since then, Google has debuted a series of fragmented shopping initiatives, including same-day delivery from local stores and charges to sellers for listings on the search engine’s shopping tab. Nothing has really stuck.
But late last year, the company scored a big hire in Bill Ready, the former chief operating officer at PayPal, and handed him control of shopping, travel, augmented reality, and Lens, Google’s image recognition software. He spoke with me last week to explain how he’s revamping his new unit.
His strategy? Remove all the fees and complications for sellers that Google had created and get back to the basics: free services supported by ads. “It was a return to first principles for Google,” he told me.
Under Ready’s leadership, Google’s done things like eliminate the fees that sellers previously had to pay to show up on Google’s shopping tab and in search. The idea is to open the services to more merchants and marketplaces, regardless of their size.
The company also killed the commissions it took from companies that used its checkout feature and added PayPal and Shopify as third-party choices instead of forcing sellers to use Google’s payment processing.
And to make it easier for sellers to shift from other services, say Amazon, Google started accepting listings in commonly used digital formats. “One of the things that we’re trying to make very clear is, we’re not the retailer,” Ready said.
The early signs are promising, he said. The number of clicks from users viewing the new shopping tab, which allows free listings, was 74% higher than those who hadn’t yet received access at the end of April, according to Google.
But Google still has a long way to go to become a major player in e-commerce. And Ready is aware this is just the beginning.
In March, just two months after Ready joined Google, the coronavirus quickly altered the shopping landscape. Online shopping, as an industry, exploded as people stayed home. “Interestingly, what we wanted to go do … didn’t change at all,” Ready said. But “the urgency absolutely changed.”
Not even a year into Ready’s tenure, a lot has changed for Google Shopping. But will this finally be the winning strategy? Maybe the 18th time will be the charm.
Danielle Abril
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Fortune is collecting nominations for our annual Most Powerful Women lists: We’re shaking things up a little this year, adding a new criterion: how the executive wields her power to shape her company and the wider world for the better. (Examples might include instituting hazard pay for frontline employees during the pandemic, instituting gender/racial pay parity, creating a program or business unit that serves a disadvantaged population, measurably reducing the company’s carbon footprint, or creating new hiring pipelines that have resulted in a more diverse workforce.)
We’re accepting submissions through this online form. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24.
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by David Z. Morris. Check out The Ledger, the fintech newsletter he edits weekly.
NEWSWORTHY
From malls to Amazon centers. In what could be the biggest signal yet of the rapid erosion of physical retail by online shopping, Simon Property Group is reportedly negotiating with Amazon to turn former anchor spaces into online fulfillment centers. Simon is the top mall developer in the U.S., and the fulfillment centers would fill spaces being vacated with increasing speed by department stores like J.C. Penney and Sears. A retail consultant speaking to Fortune’s Phil Wahba called it “a white flag moment”—that is, a surrender.
2,500 electric garbage trucks. The much-questioned hydrogen-electric trucking startup Nikola says it has inked a deal with Republic Services to deliver 2,500 battery-powered garbage trucks, with testing starting in 2022. Orders like this are great, but it’s arguably another swerve from the startup, whose core premise has long been producing long-haul freight trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells, not batteries. Nikola has not yet delivered a vehicle, but its stock appears to have drafted on Tesla’s own wild ride to a massive (if frothy) valuation.
Tech giants for H-1Bs. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and other tech companies filed an amicus brief Monday in a suit against the Trump administration’s June suspension of guest worker visas, including the H-1Bs they rely on heavily. The companies said the suspension harms the American economy and, ultimately, American workers. Trump’s move is part of a broad anti-immigration campaign driven by advisor Stephen Miller, for whom the health of the economy does not appear to be a primary concern.
The startup shakeout never came. “We have seen a very, very fast recovery,” says the CEO of Getaround, one of many digital startups whose worst fears of pandemic fallout have not come to pass. As detailed by Fortune alum Erin Griffith, venture capital is flowing as freely as ever, as digital services, delivery, streaming, payments, stock speculation, and other startup specialties experience huge growth.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“If job searches and funding searches can be conducted just as easily online as in person, and if offices can be replaced with Zoom and Slack, much of the reason for cities to exist will evaporate. That’s a big ‘if,’ of course - many have predicted that cities would decline due to teleworking technologies in the past, but it has never materialized. Still, the pandemic, by forcing knowledge industries to go remote, may force companies, workers and financiers to realize that telework tools have reached a critical level of effectiveness. If so, that will weaken superstar cities’ productivity advantage.”
That's Bloomberg's Noah Smith on the potential for coronavirus and remote-working technology to transform cities forever.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The U.S. wanted to starve Huawei of chips. It’s working — Eamon Barrett
TikTok’s woes won’t end after 45 days, even if if finds a buyer — Lucinda Shen
New York’s public transit asks Apple to solve its iPhone Face ID problem — David Porter
The U.K.’s facial recognition tests violated privacy laws, court rules — David Meyer
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BEFORE YOU GO
Social media and algorithms have killed the mystery and wonder of the internet that once was. A group of code artists called The Internet Temple is bringing it back, one strange digital experience at a time.
