If you are suggesting that zombies are just price-comparers, fair enough. Except that's hardly a "phenomenon" - it's just what people do. Be cheaper, or offer something that justifies the extra cash (we do the latter).
Or better yet, dump Google and sell on Amazon. The ROI on Amazon is much better than Google without all the headaches associated with Google flexing their dominance in search and tightening the noose around the small biz owner's neck even tighter. Amazon squeezes sellers too, but nowhere near the level Google does.
Asking Google to hide the cheapest shop is not going to work, even if that cheapest shop is Amazon.
Google does not rank products based on price. That's been proven many times over. In fact, Google will rank a loosely related Amazon category page that does not contain the product over an actual highly relevant product someone searches for if that product appears on an independent website. That's part of what drove me to Amazon, plus more of the buying traffic is searching through Amazon these days and not on Google. Half the buying traffic goes to Amazon from the start, with the other half spread across social and the other search engines. When a portion of this other half searches on Google, they are met with Amazon domain crowding almost always at the top of the organic results. We get what's left to our sites - sloppy seconds known as zombies.
Google cannot control behaviour of humans after they visit your site
True to some degree. The display of SSL warnings in search and/or Chrome can impact user behavior, though this should not be an issue because most of the smaller ecommerce sites starving for buyer traffic from Google's serps are full SSL (my site included). Regardless, Google can and does largely control who they send to your site and the way product serps heavily favor Amazon with domain crowding is one tactic Google uses to influence where shoppers go.
I see only one objective way for Google to begin to improve the serps for product queries, and that's by getting rid of Amazon crowding. Google does not have enough buyer traffic these days to spread around, and the Amazon crowding is consuming too much real estate and as a result the majority of buyer traffic. Beyond that, Google can do a much better job in ranking products not just on price, but the support offered for products, warranties, etc. For example, what we sell on Amazon has the standard Amazon 30 day guarantee and support through Amazon's messaging system. On our website, we warranty the product for a year and a customer can pick up the phone and call us. There's much more to the value of a product than its original sale price.
Here's how Google gets it wrong on price... What I sell on Amazon are individual pieces, and most people need two or more. Imagine car tires for example. When you need new tires for your car do you buy one or four? What happens is people buy multiples on Amazon whereas they could have purchase the same quantity on my website for far less with faster and cheaper shipping. However, the individual piece prices are the same on my website as they are on Amazon. If Google were to favor low prices in the serps, then Google should be smart enough to know a typical car has four tires. Regardless, this is how I offset the cost of Amazon's 15% per sale commission. When combined with a very short warranty, no phone support and more expensive shipping, I'm fine selling on Amazon and apparently Google is fine sending their users there to pay more and get less for the same product as well.
Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2017
