Joshua Warren  0:06  
eBay realized that a lot of their especially their smaller sellers, were just having struggles selling internationally or felt like hey, shipping things internationally just isn't worth the hassle. So I'm just not going to allow international purchases. Well, they have launched their international shipping program that will handle customs clearance tracking, post transaction requests, duties, all the import custom stuff, does it all for you at no extra costs?

Darin Newbold  0:37  
Good day, and welcome to another episode of Commerce today. And we've got an interesting one for you today. This one is the commerce news grab bag version. So we've got three great topics that we will probably pulled out of the grab bag for you. So first up here is some new information from Google around their shopping experience. And I missed the intro real quick. But again, my name is Darren as always, and Josh is here as our host to really bring in all the commerce news. So first up, again, is a Google introduces some new features. But these are really cool what you showed me, Josh?

Joshua Warren  1:15  
Yeah, so Google has rolled out a whole whole new and improved shopping experience, you can go in, you search for something on Google, you hit that shopping button. And it's almost like you're on a completely different site now, where you get not only just some interesting views of products, including they're not there yet, but they're gonna have 360 degree product photos coming pretty soon on a lot of these products. But also just some incredible tools, it's a much more visual experience, which is hard to describe on a podcast, but they've even applied a little bit of machine learning here, you can actually scroll down in a lot of your searches. And there's a section that's added called Top features based on our views. So I did a search. It's kind of funny, me and Darren both did kind of some sample searches. And in both cases, I was looking at some Reeboks, Darren was looking at some shorts, and it'll give you four different products in a row. And it will identify what the top feature is for each of those products based on reviews. Well, the kind of funny commonality for both me and Darren is that, you know, some of them it said, Hey, this isn't the most comfortable one. Okay, cool. Some of them then said this is the most attractive option. And the most attractive option for Darren, it was camouflaged, interesting utility cargo shorts. And for me, it has a bright orange sneaker. So I'm not sure exactly where Google is getting their review data to say these are the most attractive options. But yeah, I would question that for sure. But the other thing, because there's some good things in here, I don't want to beat up on Google. Although they're big, they can take it. They've added even more things to surface local local inventory and surface and really a really cool visual way, you can go and you can say, hey, only show me items that are available nearby, and then breaks it out into a per store view gives you the information on that store, including highlighting their omni channel pickup options. So you can see, do they offer curbside pickup in store pickup, then you get a visual view of all of the matching products that are in stock in that store. And I want to use this as a chance just to remind everybody that's listening, you can submit your product feeds to Google for free. Yes, there is a paid advertising section in this. But the vast majority of this is coming from free data feed submissions. Either just your product data feed if you're a pure play online only retailer, or if your Omni channel retailer your per store inventory feed as well. Again, you can submit those to Google for free. If you have the right data, and your feed is accepted, you keep the data very clean and accurate. I think you can drive substantial sales with this. And I just see so many retailers that either aren't using it, or just haven't put in the time to get their feed right maybe their platform that they're using makes it hard to keep their product data up to date. And maybe they need some some corrections or improvements to that product data. But getting that data in there getting the supplemental information like reviews in there can really help people find your exact store whenever they're shopping for a specific product you carry.

Darin Newbold  4:21  
Well, and one thing I noticed just real quick here, Josh is that here it has even discover a veteran owned business. So specialty stores or, or women only stores or different things like that can be highlighted here. Or you can then choose and that's all you want to look for. So if you want to shop or in a specific category, you can do that. This is really neat. Really, really neat stuff. All right. So that's that's the first one out of our out of our grab bag of fun. The second one comes to us from about Amazon and some interesting things they're doing in the in the world of shipping. So tell us about that.

Joshua Warren  4:57  
So you're gonna make me try to pronounce it first. Yeah, So Amazon, yet again, it has found a way to disrupt shipping. And they were all surprised by that. But this time it's not airplanes or their own trucks or anything like that. This time it's an acquisition they acquired a company

Unknown Speaker  5:15  
V eqo V quo Vigo V something. So

Darin Newbold  5:20  
I think it's I think it's Biko. Biko because we'll call it

Joshua Warren  5:25  
apologies Vico team if we are mispronouncing that, so Amazon bought Vico, what is Vico? It's a system that allows you to tie in your, your order sources, basically. So Amazon, eBay, Etsy, your, your web platform, all those things, your orders feed into it. And it allows you to print your shipping labels, like a lot of these services, it has some intelligence where you can tell it, hey, this order needs to arrive in seven days, what's the cheapest way to get it there and seven days, kind of another thing that some of the other competing platforms have done is it will give you discounted rates, it will give you the volume rates, right ups, USPS, DHL and FedEx. And this is pulling, you know, volume rates from Amazon. So those are probably some pretty good, desperate, yeah. What is different about this than, say, ShipStation and the other competing platforms as well Vico, before they are required, they would charge you about $450 a month for using their software. Amazon's made it free, and you don't have to sell on Amazon. Anybody can go and register and use this software. Completely free. You just pay for your shipping charges.

Darin Newbold  6:35  
Wow. Wow, that really disrupts a whole section of shipping anyway, of that whole piece of the

Joshua Warren  6:43  
commerce? For sure. Oh, definitely. I think you're gonna say first, a whole sector of society. And I mean, these days, the sheer number of Amazon UPS USPS and FedEx trucks I see on the roads. It is yes, it is it pretty much. So

Darin Newbold  6:58  
it is well. Alright, that's two out of three. So that's, let's move to our third, third topic. And this one's This one's about eBay. And we may, we may kind of age ourselves a little bit as we talk about this one. But there this is also around the shipping. But this is shipping across the pond, either direction and international way. So yeah, so

Joshua Warren  7:20  
international shipping. Doesn't have to be complicated. There's definitely a lot of retailers that have figured it out. But eBay realized that a lot of their especially their smaller sellers, were just having struggles selling internationally or felt like hey, shipping things internationally just isn't worth the hassle. So I'm just not going to allow international purchases. Well, they have launched their international shipping program that will handle customs clearance tracking, post transaction requests, duties, all the import custom stuff, does it all for you at no extra cost. So you can go in you can generate your labels ship things internationally. And, and this is where, you know, before we started recording, we were talking a bit about eBay in this program. And I gotta admit, like I have a very old out of date image of eBay, I think of eBay as hey, this is the place where you sell the stuff that didn't sell in your garage sale. I first saw this, I thought, hey, there's some guy out there that has 500 Pez dispensers in his basement, and he's so excited because now he can sell and ship a Pez dispenser from the US to the UK, Ireland anywhere overseas. And that's gonna really help his business. But as we discuss it and talked a little bit more, we realized, hey, eBay, there's a lot lot of people selling on eBay. A lot of companies are using it, not just for secondhand merchandise or liquidations but even just as other sales channels so I think it'll be interesting to see how many of those larger businesses even take advantage of this to simplify their international shipping.

Darin Newbold  8:49  
Why not a little bit than I've ever done on eBay. I've purposely said I won't sell over overseas just because I didn't want to have to mess with any of the any of the challenges so this could this could definitely open some things up so wow, that was a very fun grab bag Josh. Thanks for sharing some some neat ideas and for those out there as always, welcome you to hit the like button and subscribe to our to our podcast as well as if you have any comments. Please feel free to share them. We'd love to be able to comment on those and see where we can help out and as always have a great rest of your day and we were excited to have you as part of Commerce today.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai