Google’s Qaya service allows creators to simply create new web stores where they can sell straight to their consumers. The initiative is the latest from Google’s internal project incubator, Area 120, which recently got a boost in stature when many of its prior projects were moved to Google’s Cloud, Search, Shopping, and Commerce divisions.
Qaya was co-founded by Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey, a founder-in-residence at Area 120 who previously worked on employment marketplace Kormo aimed at the “next billion” internet users, notably those in markets like India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.
His inspiration for creating Qaya came from listening to many creators about how difficult and time-consuming it is to start their own online enterprises. In addition to the founders, there are several other members of the Qaya team who are themselves creators, and they bring with them their own knowledge of existing creation tools. Their research and conversations with other creators revealed a need for a flexible, no-code product that allows them to monetize their work and better interact with their audience.
To use the solution from Qaya, creators can create their own web stores that feature their products, services, and other digital downloads. These storefronts can then be linked to their YouTube Merch Shelf and linked to Google Search and Google Shopping. A person who creates these stores can put things like photos and files or e-books into them. They can also put digital art or other things like photo filters and presets into them. For each storefront, the company says there can be up to 1,000 items on it.
Importing physical goods or services from other platforms is also possible, so the creator can show these items on their Qaya page, with their own branding on them.
As an added bonus, each store also gets its own unique URL, which can be qaya.store/your-name or yourname.channel. This URL can be used instead of the links that stores put on social media sites with “link in bio” solutions like Linktree or Beacons.
People can use these services to make small websites that point to all of their different online places, like their social media accounts and shops. They can also make music or podcasts, blogs, and more.
These other services also let people put links to their other online profiles at the top of their Qaya stores. These links are right next to the creator’s name and bio. That’s not the whole point of the site, though. It’s meant to connect fans directly to the content the creator has for sale, not just as a place to link fans to the creator’s profiles on other services.
You can pay for things like subscriptions, a tip, or a one-time thing with Google Pay in Qaya, which is built-in. Qaya also provides sales data for the creators’ products.
For the time being, Qaya is available for free, with monetisation handled on a transactional basis. Google says that creators will keep the “vast majority” of the money they make from the products they make and sell on Qaya.
The company is now integrating the YouTube Merch Shelf with Qaya for YouTube creators who join the beta. In the future, Qaya wants to let creators sell mre products, including “other types of digital goods,” which sounds like a veiled referenoce to NFTs, but Google hasn’t said if that’s the case.
