Large e-commerce sites like Birkenstock USA would now be able to power their online stores with Google's search technology after the search engine giant has introduced a special search product to online retailers.
Google’s new application for e-commerce sites, dubbed Google Commerce Search, comes at the time when the holiday season is right around the corner and the online retailers are gearing up for spikes in traffic.
Google’s search tool for online retailers
Google Commerce Search is a Google search specifically engineered for e-commerce sites. The product aims to improve customer experience and boost sales conversion rate, which is just 3 percent. Google believes the online retailer conversion rate could be five to 10 times higher after implementing the new application.
In addition, the cloud-based enterprise search application for e-tailers promises to simplify the online shopping experience for their customers.
"There's a huge gap between customers' expectations and the actual technology that's available to retailers so far," Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager for Google's enterprise search group, told InternetNews.com. "That's why we are building and launching a product that's fully hosted in Google's cloud."
Why Google Commerce Search needed?
Marketing research firm MarketingSherpa estimates that the people who go to shop online spend an average of eight seconds before deciding whether or not to stay on a given Web site and 43 percent of online shoppers say the first thing they do is type the product name or category into the retail site's search box to start their search.
"That's the main aspect of this product," Mangtani said. "We're providing a hosted solution that gives users ultra-fast results with all the features like spellchecker and built-in query stemming capabilities."
Current e-commerce search tools are inadequate
Mangtani said that many retailers implement their own search technologies to help consumers find products on their sites, but with exception of some e-commerce giants such as Amazon and eBay, most online retailers use inadequate search engines for their sites. Such e-commerce sites’ search technologies often require shoppers to click on multiple links to narrow down their search and find the exact product or brand they're looking for. Customers generally abandon such sites without making a purchase.
"Search is far away from where the user expectations are on the majority of retail sites," Mangtani said.
"And from the retailers' perspective, they want to focus on branding and shipping and customer loyalty and inventory issues," he said. "They don't want to deal with the technology."
Mangtani said having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers, adding that Google Commerce Search can perform searches of a retailer's catalog dramatically faster than what is currently available on many retail sites.
Google Commerce Search that is hosted in the cloud starts at $50,000 per year with 24/7 support, but Mangtani said the pricing is dependent on the number of customer queries made.
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