Walk The Fence

Pretty significant step for Google in the Digital Commerce ecosystem today; at least in my mind. They have tweaked what they do best (search) to be adapted on any web storefront and essentially replace your own internal site search functionality.

If you're in the Top-tier eCommerce players out there, you have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to tweak the Search module that came with whatever platform you're running (IBM Websphere, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Commerce, etc..). Don't lie, we know you have, or if you haven't it's in a 6 figure line item of your 2010 budget. And it has been a painful road, at best so far.

Well, hold that thought and consider this:

1. You can now adapt your internal site search to use the best known search tool around in the industry for your sku's and content

2. The tool is hosted for you (No additional infrastructure, management and support cost) - Yeah you best believe it'll scale if it's hosted by Google

3. You can streamline linkage and customize your Paid Search to link directly into your own internal site search results (same engine running both)

4. Dollars allocation on Paid search campaigns attain a new and almost perfect degree of tracability on Google (of course) with integration of Google Analytics or third parties.

Yes, you're letting Google see who buys what and how...not like they don't already have a good idea anyways...To me, it's a product you cannot pass on or try to implement on your eCommerce environment; even but for a section of your skus (example: promotional, end of season sale)...

If you're a mid tier eCommerce company, the search functionality you have with your platform is a joke at best - install Google Commerce search at once and watch your conversion rate heat up.

Search is a fundamental step in the consumer research and buying process today. Can you really afford your customers to not find what they are looking for on your site?

Let me ask you this - What do you usually do when you show up in a store and you can't find what you were looking for?

Avdv.

Link to Google Commerce Search Launch info:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-google-commerce-search.html