14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced an upgrade to its search tool for online retailers and the company believes it’s big enough to warrant a version change. Google Commerce Search 2.0 comes with a lot of new stuff in terms of user-facing features and for companies as well. One ‘feature’ that interested companies will surely appreciate is the price cut, the cheapest version now starting at $25,000 per year, half of what the search giant previously charged.
“To help retail sites get ready for the summer shopping season, today we’re launching Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. The new version of Google Commerce Search provides a better experience online for shoppers and greater control - with immediate ROI - for retailers,” Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager at Google, wrote.
“Google Commerce Search, first launched a little over six months ago, is an enterprise-grade website search solution hosted in Google’s cloud and designed specifically for online retailers,” he added.
It’s a bold move from Google to call its product 2.0 just six months after it was initially launched, but, then again, version numbers never bothered its engineers too much; Google Chrome is at 6.0 only a year and a half after it was released.
That being said, the improvements probably warrant the version change. For the shoppers, the experience is significantly better and closer to what they expect from a regular Google search. Query auto-completion is a welcomed new feature and for good reason, it comes especially in handy when trying to find a specific product. There are also new spelling features and a synonym option to help out users in finding what they want.
Retailers will appreciate the new Merchandising Dashboard, which enables them to have more control over the search results. This is very useful for irregular results like promotions. They also have more leeway in adjusting the rankings and now have the possibility to create custom product filters. And with the price cut in half, Google Commerce Search will probably look a lot more interesting to potential customers.