Here we go Google with another experimental product. Google Shoploop is described as “a video shopping platform for discovering, evaluating and buying products, all in one place.“
Area 120, which is referred to as “Google’s workshop for experimental products” brought products like Byteboard, CallJoy etc., in the last year. Shoploop is their newest venture.
Lax Poojary, the General Manager for Shoploop has described his experience of how the product came into existence in the official google technology blog here.
Shoploop enables you to discover new products in a short, entertaining video format. All Shoploop videos are 90 seconds or less.
The whole idea came into existence when Lax was conducting user research in New York about shopping and came across a girl who was using three different apps to find reviews for a particular product.
- Promoted product on Social Media App
- Video reviews on Youtube App
- Finally buying the product on the specific e-commerce App
Shoploop is expected to show real video reviews of products from real people. My only concern is how many brands are going to pay people to post realistic views. Its not feasible to take the word of one video reviewer to buy any product.
Currently Shoploop is focused on content creators in the beauty industry since its the easiest demographic to work on. They cover categories makeup, skincare, hair and nails.
You could check out the Shoploop experiment by going to shoploop.app from your smartphone.
Once you open the site, its pretty clear that the site will be directly packaged as an app very soon. Also, Google has shamelessly stolen the TikTok/Instagram Reels swiping feature as you can see below. So, that’s there.
Every video is linked to a product and the link can be seen there.
Tapping on the product link would redirect you to the third party ecommerce site. I’m sure the analytics/tracking for products must be enormous on the backend. This seems like a big take on Amazon’s e-commerce & Instagram’s sponsored ads.
And from the third party site, you could purchase the product. This opens up the possibility of Google making billions of dollars from making sponsored ads from brands.
Bonus: Instagram Guides
It doesn’t have a desktop version yet but its mentioned in the Google Blog that they are working on it now. I personally don’t see how this mobile-esque user experience is going to convert to a desktop but I’m excited/scared what Area 120 is going to bring to the table.
Lets all hope that this doesn’t get added to killedbygoogle.com.
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