Google Shopping Express Poised for Testing Kickoff

One of the great issues of mobile payments is when you actually receive the stuff you bought. It’s great to be able to shop and pay for goods from a mobile device, but not actually getting the goods in question for two days or more kind of wrecks the immersion. Thus, the heat has been on to improve same-day delivery options, and Google is poised to bring out its own version known as Google Shopping Express.

Don’t grab your smartphones too soon, though; the option is in its testing phase only, and right now, that testing is limited to San Francisco. Worse, it’s not even everybody in San Francisco, but a comparatively limited quantity of people therein.

Such a move would be particularly effective for Google—NBC News opined—as it would keep people online more and allow Google to sell more online advertising. Throw in the fact that such rapid delivery would make people turn to online shopping more—immediacy is the only real advantage that brick-and-mortar shopping enjoys any more—and that’s a whole new population of online ad viewers in which Google can stake a claim.

Several major retailers have already signed up to be part of Google’s limited test run, including Walgreens and Target. Google will be using a courier service to get the goods where they need to be, and though these won’t be Google employees, they will be driving Google-branded vehicles and wearing uniforms provided by Google. This might prove a problem for Google later, especially if the drivers are considered “contractors”, but that’s tangential right now.

While there are some potential hiccups in this operation—like what happens when drone delivery takes off, as it’s looking to, or how the IRS responds to this matter—Google has one thing exactly right: customers want their items faster. The notion of everything but receipt taking minutes but receipt taking days is galling. The whole point of mobile shopping and mobile payments is convenience and speed, and by making the receipt time so much longer, that only encourages people to go to the store.

Google’s move may or may not work, but it’s good all the same to see obvious concern over shipping speed figure into the mobile payments landscape.