Google Checkout Adds Trends
Google is now revealing some seriously important market data via its Google Trends service. Whereas before, Google Trends just revealed search volume, trends that while certainly of interest did not necessarily reflect anything beyond a measure of the internet popularity of a term we now have Google Checkout Trends.
The new Checkout Trends service does reveal important information, namely, the sales data of merchants in Google’s Checkout sales network. This data is extremely valuable and usually hard to come buy; often researchers have to pay firms like the NPD Group a lot of money to know how well their competitors are doing in retail stores; but Google is giving away all the information for free.
Sure, Google Checkout represents only a subset of the entire marketplace, not including any brick-and-mortar stores, as well as thousands of major internet retailers (like Amazon.com, or the websites of Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy), but Google’s data certainly has significant value for market trend research.
Data goes back to July 2006, and does not reveal actual revenue, but rather revenue trends as measured on an unspecified scale. Items can be filtered by price, and multiple products can be compared against each other.
Also worth noting: Google Checkout will finally start charging for all those credit card transactions it’s been making on February 1, 2008, after 13 months of giving the store away. Will Checkout finally start making money (or at least losing less of it), or will merchants stop using it, now that Google isn’t paying them anymore to keep the service?
