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EBay wants its mobile shopping to be fast — and it is turning to Google for a boost.
The e-retailer announced on Thursday it will start working with Google AMP, the search giant’s open source initiative to load mobile websites quickly. EBay said pages landed through Google search — and through other AMP partners like Twitter — will improve speed for its item listings at first, but that the company is moving toward a “full-fledged e-commerce experience in AMP.”
We asked both companies for clarity on how many eBay pages are going to load through Google AMP on the onset, but haven’t heard back.
For eBay, the partnership could grease the wheels for sales, if faster load times do that. For Google, the partnership is a bigger win: It helps keep more mobile e-commerce activity — and therefore, search ads — on the web rather than inside apps.
Google AMP is partly a response to efforts from tech rivals to host publishing content on their own platforms, particularly Facebook’s Instant Articles.
But when AMP launched earlier this year, Recode noted that Google had ambitions beyond just hosting news — it is happy to port the entire web into the platform. We said that e-commerce was a natural next step. Seems that’s coming now.
Here’s our conversation with eBay CEO Devin Wenig from our Code Conference in May.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
