Google Confirms ‘Buy Button’ Is Coming

Omid Kordestani chief business officer reports Google’s next commerce effort will be a “buy button” to help people purchase products featured in its shopping ads.

“There’s going to be a buy button. It’s going to be imminent,” Kordestani said onstage at the Code Conference Wednesday.

Kordestani described the product launch as a way to remove friction for users so they buy more things online. Some 90 percent of commerce is still offline, he noted.

Kordestani was Google’s first business hire and last October was tapped by CEO Larry Page to return to the leadership after a five-year break.

News of the buy button was first reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

Kordestani also noted onstage that people are more frequently making mobile searches that lead to offline purchases, too. He said the number of Google queries that include proximity — where users try to find something near them — has doubled in the last year.

In her annual forecast presentation earlier in the day, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers predicted that so-called buy buttons would be a quickly adopted feature for Google and other companies, helping close the mobile monetization gap.AsRe/code’s Jason Del Rey described it, the button would appear on Google’s paid product listing ads. Shoppers who click on the ads on their phones will be directed to a Google webpage to make a purchase of that single item.