In an email interview with Business Standard, Ramaswamy, senior vice-president (ads & commerce), talks about the company’s latest venture, Google Shopping Express, a same-day grocery delivery service launched in the US.
He also shares the company’s overall plans in the commerce space and its desire to work with the start-up community in India.
Edited excerpts:
Recently, you launched Google Shopping Express in the US. How big is the opportunity and what have been the challenges in executing it?
As a sector, we’ve made great strides to help improve the online shopping experience through the years.
With Google Shopping Express, our goal is to help make local shopping more convenient.
By working closely with some of the shoppers’ favourite local merchants, we can help people easily buy what they want and get it delivered to their doorsteps quickly and affordably, in a matter of hours.
In many ways, the same-day delivery space is still in infancy; we’ve invested a lot of effort in ensuring we’re building a service that is not only useful and delightful for shoppers but a model we can scale broadly.
It’s taken us some time, as we’ve fine-tuned the experience for shoppers in the San Francisco Bay area -- from packaging changes to creating more efficient delivery routes.
Do you plan to launch it in India, where online grocery shopping is taking off?
We’ll continue to look for ways to improve the system and are working with our retail partners to bring Shopping Express to more cities soon.
I don’t have specific plans to share at this point but I’m very pleased with how things are going and hope we can bring it to many more shoppers soon.
Earlier, you had mentioned your aim was to make online commerce, on a large scale, ‘as frictionless as possible’, rather than just looking at launching an online marketplace. Is marketplace still an option?
Our overall goal in the commerce space is to help people find the products they’re looking for online; connect them with great merchants from whom they can buy those products, and make the whole process as seamless as possible.
That vision is bigger than just having an online marketplace.
It involves everything from helping retailers optimise their websites to making mobile payments easier with Google Wallet Instant Buy and helping
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