Google-Powered Search for Your Retail Site

If you run a retail website with lots (at least a few hundred) items in your catalog, Google just launched a new product that’s worth investigating. It’s called Google Commerce Search (GCS). I am not endorsing this product or being compensated for this blog post. I’m simply trying to inform you about this option.

According to Google, the concept behind GCS is simple – visitors take about 8 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on your website. And in that 8 seconds, a lot of people (over 40% according to this PDF from MarketingSherpa) perform a search to find the brand or product that they want. So if that many people rely on search to make their decision on whether to stay or go, then why not have that search powered by Google?

Besides having Google-quality search, GSC is scalable, customizable, supposedly easy to implement, and fully trackable via analytics.

How does it work? First you need to submit all of your products to Google Merchant Center via data feeds, direct uploads, or their API. Then you login to your admin panel and customize the way you want your on-site search engine to work. According to Google, that’s pretty much it.

Now you’re thinking this sounds cool, so how much does it cost? Well, it depends on how many products you have. This is a cloud-based application, so Google can be a little more flexible with the pricing. But, pricing starts at $50,000 – so this is no small investment for a lot of retail website owners out there.

As usual, Google has included a handy-dandy video to explain their new product:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj7qrotOmVY

I’m interested to see this in action. Google obviously has the search skills and experience to make this work. The benefit to them is that, yet again, they’ll be gaining some really valuable data about pricing, user behavior, buying patterns, etc. In fact that’s the value to them in doing this. I don’t see this as a huge money maker for them.

If you see this live on a website, leave a comment with a link.

Leave a Comment