WTF, Google Sells Company Merchandise Online?

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Color me surprised to discover Google operates an online merchandise store aptly named Google Store, courtesy of @newsycombinator. Google-centric blogs like Google Blogoscoped have understandably been aware of this for quite some time, but I had no idea. There’s no mention of it on the Google corporate website (although it’s linked at the bottom here), and even the Wikipedia entry simply redirects to a list of all its products. They’re apparently even running ad units for it on their network (see below).

Apparently, created back in 2006 several years ago, the online store features a big inventory of items featuring Google brands for sale, ranging from adult and kids clothing to accessories like lava lamps, mugs, Yo-Yos and lip balm. There’s even a recently launched section reserved exclusively for YouTube-branded stuff, and I’m definitely tempted to purchase one of those exquisite YouTube Snap Bibs for the next newborn in the family.

Two questions pop into my head: when’s the Bing Store coming (the domain name has already been secured by Microsoft), and how much revenue is Google getting out of this well-hidden Google Store?

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