Google Commerce Search – New Search Tool for Shopping Sites

Google has just unveiled their new Commerce Search tool for retailers. It’s an enterprise tool for retail shopping sites aimed to make shopping experience more worthwhile as the holiday season is approaching.

“Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too. Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable” –Google Blog

Basically, it’s targeted to make the search experience on an e-commerce site more precise. It’s hosted on Google’s cloud servers which make it more scalable and deliver results faster than standard search results on shopping sites. Stemming, Synonyms and Spell Check makes sure that online shoppers gets exactly what they are looking for, even if he or she doesn’t exactly know the product name.

For retailers, Commerce Search is integrated with other Google tools such as Google Checkout for payment handling and Google Analytics for tracking your visitor’s behavior and other metrics on the shopping site. Check out the introductory video of Google Commerce Search:

Shaun Ryan did some research on Google’s Demo shopping site, which is powered by the same tool and he thinks that the product is not ready for prime time yet. He tried searching for “tshirt” and it delivered no results, whereas searching for “t-shirt” delivered 42 results, which is quite disappointing. The price of this product is based on number of products and search queries, but starts at $50,000 per year which is quite “high” in my opinion.