Posted by Naveen Viswanatha, Product Manager, Google Commerce

Two years ago in November, we launched Google Commerce Search, which provides the search quality of Google to e-commerce websites with interactive user features such as Suggestions, Search As You Type and Product Recommendations. With Google Commerce Search, retailers such as GNC, L’Occitane and Forever21 are powering fast, interactive and relevant search and navigation for their customers. Simple integration with mobile and local search results allows shoppers to find products in physical stores nearby, helping retailers offer a great shopping experience from start to finish.

We’ve grown both in product features and user adoption in the past two years, but we’re not done yet. In fact, we want to make it even easier for retailers to adopt Google Commerce Search to help them achieve amazing results and meet their customers’ needs.

So today we’re announcing that we’re growing the Google Commerce Search family with the launch of the Google Commerce Search Reseller Program. Through this new program, technology providers can bring the unique capabilities of Google Commerce Search to their retail clients.

We’ve been working with some leading technology providers who have developed solutions around Google Commerce Search for the web and for mobile, and we’re excited to formalize the program and invite even more technology providers to come on board with us.

Our first new reseller is Branding Brand, a leader in the mobile commerce space who works with large multi-channel retailers to develop mobile and social commerce applications. The firm sought out Google when they heard about Google Commerce Search, as they knew it would deliver additional value to their customers. “Mobile users are often action-oriented--whether they’re locating a store, seeing what products are available nearby, or searching for a specific item–so it’s important to quickly provide relevant information in the proper context. Google Commerce Search allows us to do exactly this,” says co-founder Chris Mason. GNC was Branding Brand’s first client to launch with Google Commerce Search earlier this year, and here is what their CMO Jeff Hennion has to say about the results:



In fact, with Branding Brand we’d also like to announce our newest retail customer: Timberland. With Branding Brand and Google Commerce Search, Timberland has been able to make their mobile vision a reality, both in the core site experience but also in integrating the critical search capabilities provided by Google Commerce Search. Timberland makes quality and environmentally-responsible products, so we couldn’t be happier to welcome them to our family.

“At Timberland, the consumer always comes first. Our priority in developing our mobile website was making sure customers had the best experience possible,” said Chris Hardisty, director of Timberland Global E-Commerce. “Shoppers today expect fast and relevant results especially on mobile where speed and interactivity matter most. Since we launched our mobile-optimized website, we have seen mobile sales grow 20 times faster than our desktop site sales.”

We’re also happy to welcome Perficient, a leading technology integrator specializing in e-commerce. Perficient was keenly interested developing solutions around Google Commerce Search given the capabilities it can provide to their clients. “Google Commerce Search brings retailers of all sizes the advanced Google search features that were previously only available to the biggest players in the space, including Search As You Type, local product availability, and engaging mobile experiences,” says Sameer Peera, Principal of Perficient’s National Commerce Practice.

If you’re interested in becoming a Google Commerce Search reseller, please let us know by getting in touch.

Posted by Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce, HealthWarehouse

Editors note: HealthWarehouse.com is America’s largest and fastest growing, accredited online pharmacy, which boasts an inventory of over 4,000 unique prescription drugs. The company was recently featured in Consumer Reports as one of the top drugstores in the United States. We’ve invited today’s guest blogger, Marston Alfred, Director of E-commerce at HealthWarehouse.com, to share why HealthWarehouse implemented Google Commerce Search. To read more, download the case study.

HealthWarehouse isn’t your typical pharmacy. Instead of physical stores, we rely on a website where we sell and ship medications to tens of thousands of customers throughout the country. And while an online-only presence allows us to save on typical infrastructure and personnel costs, it also presents some unique challenges.

From the beginning, implementing quality e-commerce search was critical to our business. Medication names are complicated and difficult for pharmacists to spell – let alone the consumer (amlodipine benazepril as an example) – so it’s necessary that we have a search and navigation experience that can interpret customer intent as well as a pharmacist could. But as we quickly found, e-commerce search can be very complicated.

To tackle the search problem we evaluated several third-party e-commerce solutions, but these providers would have required us to manually register thousands of common medication misspellings and synonyms – which wasn’t feasible or scalable, and would have required constant fine-tuning. Providing relevant results for our audience was also an issue. In search, our customers demand the expertise and intuition of a pharmacist, and you can imagine how this would be difficult to provide without reams of historical data related to medicine and our business. Enter Google.

Google Commerce Search utilizes the same underlying spellchecker and thesaurus of Google.com (tried and tested on over one billion queries across every imaginable category each day) to automate the display of results on retail websites. Google Commerce Search uses these signals to provide a search and discovery solution that performs phenomenally out-of-the-box, and only gets better the more people use it.

We implemented Google Commerce Search, and results for complicated prescription names were instantly more accurate, providing a 40% decrease in call-center volume (literally overnight). Clearly, visitors are now finding and discovering products much better on their own. In line with this unexpected drop in customer support calls, actual searches increased 85%, unique visitors and page views doubled, and conversions rose 19%. Search became a much more valuable component of our website.

Switching to Google Commerce Search not only increased our revenues, but also allowed us to focus and scale our core business (which, believe it or not is affordable medication and not IT). More importantly, Google’s search and navigation solution has significantly improved product discovery, putting affordable medication into the hands of more people.

Posted by Erik De Muinck Keizer, Head of Enterprise Search, EMEA

For the past 18 months, retailers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Japan, and France have benefited from a better search and browse experience on their e-commerce sites, powered by Google. Retailers such as Woodcraft.com, BabyAge.com, and HealthWarehouse.com implemented Google Commerce Search on their respective websites. As a result, Woodcraft increased search revenues 34%, BabyAge increased site searches 64% and HealthWarehouse saw online conversions increase 19%—and all have reported an increase in customer satisfaction. Similarly, many prominent global retailers like L’Occitane en Provence and Forever 21 have pre-announced their implementation of Google Commerce Search or recently gone live with GCS on their mobile websites.

We’re delighted to be expanding our international presence by announcing that Google Commerce Search is now available in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Key benefits include:

• A rich shopping experience: Provide the same interactive shopping experience found on only the top retail websites. Google Commerce Search includes features such as instant results that display with every keystroke, automated product recommendations, spell-checker, synonyms and many enhancements to come.
  
• The most effective merchandising: Automate promotion of cross-sells and up-sells across your site and highlight related content without the need for an entire engineering team to manually tweak and optimize your shopping experience.
  
• A powerful management suite: Our all-encompassing customization tools enable flexibility and control so that your business can adapt to changing requirements more quickly and at lower cost.
  
• Mobile compatibility: Provide a fast, relevant and mobile-friendly shopping experience from any device.
  

If you’re a global retailer already using Google Commerce Search, the full capabilities of our product are immediately available for your Italian, Spanish, and Dutch language websites. If you’re a retailer who would like to take advantage of capabilities like the ones mentioned above, visit www.google.com/commercesearch.

The retail landscape is evolving as new technologies provide additional ways to discover and purchase products. Mobile devices, for example, are fundamentally changing how consumers shop by facilitating product discovery, the reading of reviews, and more – all on the fly. Online shopping is also expanding as a result of technologies like Google Product Search and the Shopper mobile app, two of many new channels which drive traffic to both desktop and mobile sites.

In a March 2011 research study conducted by ROI Research, 49% of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the past six months, with 82% of respondents using mobile search to find an online retailer. Understandably, more and more retailers are not only improving their desktop site, but also creating distinct mobile experiences.

Join us tomorrow for a special look at innovations in e-commerce like the ones mentioned above. We’ll share our observations and a few ways you can increase conversion by bringing the latest in online retailing to your site.

When: Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM PT/2:00PM ET
Who: Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager for Google Commerce
Nancy Miller, VP of Internet and Development for Woodcraft Supply
Register now

We hope you'll join us, and also check out some of the other retail events we’re hosting in Santa Monica and New York.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Google Commerce Team

As we announced on the Official Google Blog, we’ve just launched the third-generation of Google Commerce Search – our search solution for e-commerce websites. With the new release, we’re making online shopping more interactive, connecting local and mobile product discovery, and providing sophisticated tools to help retailers manage the shopping experience on their site.



Search is evolving, smartphone sales are already outpacing PC’s, and the entire retail landscape is on the verge of a transformation. We believe that these new features will help shape the future of online shopping, and allow retailers to provide the best possible experience on their site (and on any mobile device).

• Search As You Type: Search is quickly becoming a more interactive experience. Search As You Type provides instant gratification to shoppers – returning product results with every keystroke, right from the search bar.
  
• Local Product Availability: This year, 46% of retail sales will be influenced by online research – but more than 90% of total retail transactions will occur in-store (eMarketer, June 2010). Local Product Availability helps retailers bridge online and offline sales by showing shoppers when a product is also available in a store nearby – in-line with the search results.
  
• Enhanced Merchandising: Retailers need to be agile to effectively respond to shopping trends and market dynamics – for example ramping up certain underdog basketball team apparel going into the Final Four! Our new merchandising tools allow retailers to easily set query-based landing pages, and to create promotions that display alongside related search queries in retailer-designated banner areas.
  
• Product Recommendations (Labs): To help consumers discover related products, Product Recommendations show shoppers what other people viewed and ultimately bought.
  

With this release we're also welcoming three new retail partners: Forever21, General Nutrition Company (GNC) and L’Occitane. GNC implemented Google Commerce Search in less than a week on their mobile website, while Forever 21 and L’Occitane are currently working to implement various new features of GCS, such as Search as You Type and Local Product Availability. Here is what Jeff Hennion, EVP & Chief Branding Officer at GNC had to say about the rise of smartphone adoption, and how Google Commerce Search has helped his business adapt to this new shopping medium:

"The velocity of smartphone adoption has made the mobile channel increasingly important for retailers. GNC wanted a flexible solution that would provide the best in e-commerce search while allowing us to develop a unique mobile experience. Google Commerce Search allowed us to upgrade our mobile search solution in less than a week and deliver a faster, more targeted experience for our smartphone users."

And Christine Burke, VP of International E-Commerce at L’Occitane is looking forward to implementing GCS 3.0 on her company’s new, re-designed websites worldwide:

"L’Occitane is unique in that our beauty products center around ingredients - such as lavender, shea butter and verbena. As our customers visit our re-designed website to shop and research our products, we are excited about the speed and accuracy of on-site search results that will be provided to us through Google Commerce Search. We are also very excited about the possibility of the new local inventory feature, which can help us connect our customers with their favorite products in one of our 170 US boutiques."

Learn how you can provide the latest in retail technology on your website with Google Commerce Search. Sign up for our upcoming webinar (details below). You’ll hear from Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager, in conversation with Google Commerce Search customers about how these new features are transforming retail for the better.

Google Commerce Search 3.0: Driving user engagement and cross-channel coordination in retail
Wednesday, May 5, 2011
2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT

Posted by Naveen Viswanatha, Product Manager, Google Commerce Search

Editor’s note: Woodcraft Supply is one of the nation’s oldest and largest suppliers of quality woodworking tools and supplies, offering more than 20,000 products through its retail stores, catalog, and website. We’ve invited today’s guest blogger, Nancy Miller, VP of Internet Sales and Development for Woodcraft Supply, to talk about how Google has helped her increase search revenue and transform Woodcraft’s online store. To learn more about her experience, read the Woodcraft.com case study.


At Woodcraft, we strive to provide the best experience for our customers, which means helping them find the right tool for the project. To this end, our retail stores are staffed with knowledgeable woodworkers. Online, we need a powerful search engine.

Prior to our switch to Google Commerce Search, Woodcraft had been using another popular third-party search solution - but we just weren’t seeing the same level of satisfaction on our website as we were in our stores. Visitors to our site often couldn’t find the products they were looking for, and our support team fielded a lot of complaints. Our customers were frustrated and our conversions suffered so we decided to make a change.

After thorough research, we picked Google to host our e-commerce search; their service provided better results, improved rankings, and an intuitive administrator interface. Google Commerce Search is simpler to maintain and much more effective than our old solution - even before customization. In fact, during our testing period we moved half of our traffic to Google Commerce Search and left the remainder on our existing solution – and with Google our conversions from search were 27.7 percent higher and our search revenues were up 34 percent!

Beyond providing a multifaceted search experience with better results, and increasing our online sales, Google Commerce Search has made our customers and employees much happier with our website. The complaints have virtually disappeared, giving us more time to focus on our passion: woodworking.



Above: Nancy Miller, Kyle Crabtree, Chris Brown, Matt Hall, Steve Markle, September Fleming, and Daniel Pennock with their latest woodworking project.

Posted by Nancy Miller, Woodcraft Supply

Last week, we asked you and the twittersphere to share your shopping experiences during a record-breaking Cyber Monday. We were pleased to hear from so many of you, and the good news is that you found a lot of great deals (we’re jealous!).

We looked at each of your comments and noticed a few interesting trends:

• 77% of those surveyed used search within an e-commerce website to find products.
• Responders were most impressed by e-tailers who had great deals (22%) and a fast/easy shopping experience (14%). (Top Trends)
• Shoppers cited a difficulty finding items (11%) more frequently than shipping problems (10%) or a lack of good deals (8%). (Top Trends)

This Cyber Monday, online retailers seemed to be focused exclusively on offering great deals and promotions. Yet when provided with an open-ended format to comment on their shopping experiences, consumers were most concerned with findability. Here’s what some of them had to say:

"I was utterly appalled by the experience. All the products were just in a long list, where you had to click through the pages to browse. There was no search box... it took me nearly half an hour to find what I wanted.”

"[It was] difficult to find what you want, meaning you spent hours searching."

“You couldn't search worth a darn. So disappointing... Why is it so hard to get this right?"

"Their site was extremely lagged for most of their sale. It cost them a purchase from me because I gave up."

We think it’s time for online retailers to re-evaluate their priorities. Google Commerce Search was created to address the above concerns and more, and retailers who have implemented it have seen searches increase, search time decrease, and conversions rise significantly. Consider BabyAge.com, an IR500 website who switched to GCS and saw searches rise 58% and search page views grow 64%, contributing to a 34% increase in sales conversions. Implementing a hosted e-commerce solution like Google Commerce Search can fundamentally improve your shopping experience, but don't take our word for it – hear what the CEO of BabyAge.com has to say.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Product Marketing, Google Commerce Search Team

It’s Google Commerce Search’s first birthday and we are celebrating it with Jack Kiefer, CEO of BabyAge.com, one of the top 500 online retailers in North America. Since implementing Google Commerce Search, BabyAge.com has seen searches rise 58% and search page views grow 64%, contributing to a 34% increase in sales conversions. You can read about Jack’s experience in this case study or watch this video to hear more:



Google Commerce Search (GCS) is Google’s core search technology tailored for retailers. It’s an e-commerce search solution that’s hosted in the cloud, meaning you don’t need to install any hardware or software. It also uses the exact same product feed that many retailers already submit to Google Products – so most of the work associated with the typical e-commerce search implementation is already complete. Finally, GCS provides extensive administrative controls to customize search results and navigation so that they are just right for your website.

Since our debut last November we’ve expanded geographically – we now offer GCS in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany and Japan – and have added many new features like query auto-completions and a merchandising dashboard. Needless to say we’ve grown quite a bit in a year!

Just as we’ve progressed in our first year, the Google Commerce Search team strives to continue to improve online shopping and we need your help! Share your best and worst experiences from Cyber Monday, and we’ll publish select submissions in a few weeks. If you’re one of the first 50 respondents we’ll send you a Google sticker as a “thank you” gift.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise Search

If you’ve been to a grocery store or even switched on your television this week, you may have noticed that Halloween is here – a telltale sign that the holiday season is approaching. And since holidays mean more shopping, here at Google our Commerce Search team has been working very hard to help get your retail websites ready for the business boom.

For most retail businesses the holiday season can be the busiest time of the year, and we want to help you get excited about it. We’ve been listening to your feedback and noticed that many of you desire a greater ability to customize your site search so that it’s exactly the way you want it. Today we are pleased announce that we are giving you your holiday gift early, and in the form of three new customization features.

1. Control over auto-completions. Query auto-completion leverages the machine learning of Google to automatically provide a relevant list of suggestions every time a user types a search query on your site. While this eliminates the need for manual entry of query suggestions, many of you still wanted administrative control.

With this feature, users can now control their auto-completions. Let’s say you are an online candy reseller and typing “ch” triggers “cherry cough drops” and not “chocolate covered almonds,” your most popular treat.


You can add “cherry cough drops” to your list of exclusions and “chocolate covered almonds” to your list of inclusions to display the auto-completions you prefer. For more extensive customization, you can even upload inclusions and exclusions in bulk, so you don’t have to enter the query customizations line by line.


2. Easier Facets. We have made it easier to build navigation features by auto-populating the options based on what we know about your specified attribute. So, if you want to build a facet around “shirts,” options for price, color, size, and any of your own particulars will be listed automatically. This makes it simple to customize search results.

3. Improved Documentation. Now you can find information about how to customize your search with improved documentation and code samples. These can be found at the GCS code page.

These new features can be activated today by visiting your GCS control panel, and we hope that while you’re eating Halloween treats you’ll utilize them to prepare your e-commerce site for the holiday rush. If you are new to Google Commerce Search, visit google.com/commercesearch for more information or to sign-up now.

Posted by Andy Herrman, Software Engineer and Salmaan Rashid, Senior Technical Solutions Engineer

Did you know that a user spends an average of just eight seconds on a website before deciding whether to stick around (Marketing Sherpa)? If you’re an e-commerce site, this means you have to be faster than Usain Bolt - the world record-holder for the 100m dash.

Next week, find out how Google can help you capitalize on those eight seconds and improve your online shopping experience. Visit the Google Commerce Search team at Shop.org’s Annual Summit, held in Dallas, Texas from September 27 - 29.

If your organization plans to attend the show, be sure to visit Google in Booth #120 and attend the Big Ideas session Wednesday at 12:45 PM featuring Nitin Mangtani of Google Enterprise, who will be speaking about search insights for today’s e-commerce technology.

The Google Commerce Search team will be joined by Product Search, AdWords, and the Google Affiliate Network. We can’t wait to show you the many different ways we can help your business.

Posted by Guillaume De Zwirek, Google Commerce Search team

As we just announced on the Google Australia blog, Google Commerce Search is extending its availability beyond the U.S. and U.K. to include Aussie retailers. With this launch, Australian e-commerce sites will be able to respond to the growing proportion of shoppers who turn to the web to research and purchase products – and unfortunately often have a hard time finding what they’re looking for.

Launching today at the Online Retailer Conference & Expo in Sydney, Google Commerce Search can now bring the same speed, relevancy, and ease of use that retailers like Smart Furniture in the U.S. and Chemist Direct in the U.K. have chosen for their sites.

If you’re an e-commerce company in Australia and won’t be attending the conference in Sydney this week, you can learn more by visiting the website or contacting us here.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Commerce Search team

As we just announced on the Official Google Blog, today we’re launching Google Commerce Search 2.0 for online retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. With the new release, we’re offering both greater control and customization for retailers and a better experience for online shoppers.

The e-commerce industry is changing rapidly, and we’re responding quickly to meet retailer’s changing needs. Just seven months after our initial launch we’re adding a host of features to help retailers provide the best possible shopping experience on their sites.

• Enhanced merchant customization: With the full merchandising dashboard, Google Commerce Search 2.0 gives e-merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering customization—and no custom coding means that marketers and merchandisers can do all of this themselves.
• Simple promotion set-up and management: New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, custom filtering of results, and simple ranking rules mean retailers can “set it and forget it” using the new ranking wizards.
• Better browsing and navigation: No matter how advanced the search function, some shoppers will always visit your site looking to browse and discover new products. People can now shop by browsing your site as well as searching directly for products.
• Evolved shopper experience: One of the most popular features on Google.com but rarely found on retail websites, “as-you-type suggestions” help sites become more user-friendly and fast. Now, with query autocompletion retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding.
• Search quality improvements: Google Commerce Search continues to build on the speed and end-user innovation featured in the first release. Because it’s hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. Spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonyms mean that shopping on a retail site can be as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.

Each of these improvements can make an impact on the usability and success of your online store, but collectively they have real ROI potential. Because more and more consumers are turning to the web to both research and complete purchases, eliminating frustration and improving site usability can lead to major advances in both online and offline channels.

For example, Google Commerce Search customer Discount Office Items is seeing immediate ROI. “When we saw how fast we could recoup our spending and start making more money due to better, faster search, the decision to implement Google Commerce Search was clear. Since deployment, visitor volumes and revenue have jumped 6.4%. Search is now one of the strongest elements of our site – all with less load on our servers and less time spent on maintenance for the IT staff,” says Tim Horton, Co-Founder and CEO.

Finally, we’re also making the benefits of Google Commerce Search 2.0 available to a wider range of retailers by introducing a pricing model that starts at $25k/year. For details on how Google Commerce Search can help your business, contact us.

To learn more, sign up for our upcoming webinar hosted by Chain Store Age (details below). You’ll hear from Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager, in conversation with Google Commerce Search customers about how these new features can help bring your e-commerce site to the next level.

Google Commerce Search: Delivering Search Innovations to Retailers and Shoppers
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT

Posted by Carl Evankovich, Software Engineer

It’s that time of year again. Brick-and-mortar stores are clearing out the sweaters and snow-mobiles and revamping window displays with sandals and scuba gear. We know that online retailers are painstakingly updating their virtual window space as well and (perhaps even more importantly) are thinking hard about how new technologies can bring a fresh edge to their website – and the bottom line.

To kick off the season, Google hosted “search summits” for more than 200 retailers in our London and New York offices last month. These summits allowed retailers to share their top priorities and concerns from a technology and business standpoint, and provided an opportunity for Google Product Managers, Engineers, Partner Managers, and customers to trade best practices in the industry.

We want to share the learnings with people who weren’t able to attend, so we’re extending an invitation to a live webcast on Friday, May 14 presented by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager for Google Commerce Search. We’ll cover all the basics of what makes good search on e-commerce sites, how improving search speed and usability can help improve customer satisfaction and increase sales, and how top online retailers have made the switch.

Join us to learn more – and bring your questions!

Google Commerce Search – Basics & Beyond

Friday, May 14, 2010

10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT / GMT 06:00

Register here.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Enterprise Search Marketing team

From building and improving search on Google.com, my fellow engineers and I have learned a lot about how people search and why factors such as stemming, spelling, and synonyms are so important, even in the context of our business tools.

One of our first and most important observations was that returning zero results for a search query is one of the fastest ways to frustrate visitors – and lose potential customers. Shoppers who have made it to your site and searched for a product or category have expressed clear interest in buying from you, and returning no results is akin to accidentally forgetting to turn around the "Closed" sign on your storefront door in the morning!

Fortunately, retailers do have tools available to avoid this pitfall: automatic stemming, spell-checker, and synonym dictionaries can help ensure that customers find related or similar products on your site, even if they don't type in the exact product name or description text.

Like Google.com, Google Commerce Search has always arrived "out of the box" with the best automatic stemming, spelling, and synonym technology available. Starting today, it's become even easier for retailers with unusual or distinct product catalogs to upload and manage custom synonym dictionaries.

Now retailers who choose to enable advanced synonym options can simply add sets of synonyms specific to their product lines and can also trigger search expansion, so that the query as typed automatically triggers results for synonymous products.

Google already has a large body of synonym data for general search terms, and since Google Commerce Search lets you harness many of the search features of Google.com, you shouldn't bother replicating the work. Instead, focus on adding synonyms for queries specific to your product line or online store.

It's easy for search engine administrators to add synonyms to their accounts. Simply log into the control panel and add or delete search terms you want to trigger the synonym expansion. Or, if you have a large number of terms to add, you can create an XML file and quickly upload that to your account.

We hope you'll join us on our quest to end unnecessary zero result queries!

Posted by Tianyu Wen, Software Engineer

If your company runs a website, you already know the importance of search engine marketing and optimization. But are you confident that your website is providing the very best user experience possible? If you haven't added or improved your search function yet, you could be missing out on conversions, sales, and repeat visits.

Next week, we're hitting the road to help spread the message about Google Commerce Search and Google Site Search. Visit us at Search Engine Strategies New York, held March 22 to 26th at the Hilton New York. Stop by the Google booth (#1007) to ask questions and learn how to bring visitors to your site, optimize their experience, and convert them into loyal customers.

On Thursday, don't miss our lunch session on Increasing Conversions with Google Site Search Solutions. Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager on Google Enterprise, will explain how improving your site's search engine – whether you run an e-commerce or any other type of site – is key to stretching your SEM dollars and converting each and every visitor.

We'll have a few fun Google schwag giveaways too, so we hope that you'll join us. All conference registrants are welcome and no additional sign-up is needed.

Hope to see you next week in the Big Apple!

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Jason Hellman, Information Access and Search Practice Leader at Innovent Solutions, a Google Enterprise Partner that works with Google search and analytics technologies. For the past eleven years, Jason has implemented eCommerce search, Enterprise search, and Business Intelligence solutions at major Internet Retailer Top 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

When Google announced Google Commerce Search we were excited to learn about the technology and the business challenges it could help solve. The promise of Google's outstanding relevance being tailored to the unique needs of eCommerce search was an intriguing prospect and we wanted to be very involved.

Google Commerce Search delivers features such as parametric search, product promotions, and customization which extend the powerful backbone of their high-availability, highly-scalable infrastructure. All of this allows the eRetailer to focus on merchandising and quality of search instead of issues such as infrastructure and peak loads. It's exciting technology and very powerful.

One of the biggest challenges we typically face is the ability to provide a demonstration of technology that is tailored to the specific interests and culture of our clients. The issue is fairly simple: how do I build a compelling proof of concept quickly that will be received enthusiastically by my customer?

It’s a challenge in any situation, but it’s even more difficult for eCommerce search. Search results are interwoven within the site design, and customers often want to see how search technology will help improve their existing product thumbnails page. Creating a demonstration usually means rewiring a sample page with enough technology to demonstrate the desired features. Submission forms, pagination, browser history, and the various search features themselves must be hand-crafted. Simply put, it can be a tedious and time-consuming task.

To help commerce site managers and developers understand the capabilities of Google Commerce Search, and see the features that are often important, we developed a reference application using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). By including the GWT-generated JavaScript within a sample page, and adding a few "div" tags to surround elements to replace, it is possible to take a static HTML page and turn it into a robust AJAX application, deriving results from Google Commerce Search.

A few tweaks to a style sheet and the results will appear identical to the original source page. It's that simple: add some JavaScript, wrap some elements with "div" tags, and tinker with a few CSS settings.

We can then present the Google Commerce Search results as if they were within the client's site itself, fully functional with faceted navigation, promotions, and all the power of Google's searching relevance.

The story can end here, as we now have a functioning implementation of Google Commerce Search. But a proof of concept only tells a part of the story. The rest of the story is told by interweaving features throughout your site with promotional zones, merchandising options, and strategies to make the most of your data and your shopper's experience.

If you'd like check out our open source solution for Google Commerce Search, take a look at the demo page on our website and let us know what you think.

Jason Hellman

Information Access and Search Practice Leader, Innovent Solutions

Posted by Brent VerWeyst, Enterprise Search Partner Lead

Last week, I sat down with Tim Horton, CEO of DiscountOfficeItems.com, to present a webinar entitled “How Discount Office Items Increased Revenue 6% by Switching to Google Commerce Search.”

I appreciate any chance to speak in-depth with Google customers and partners, but what I thought was most interesting about my conversation with Tim was a quick poll we ran midway through the presentation: When asked how satisfied they were with current search performance on their website stores, 82% of respondents said that they were neutral, unhappy or very unhappy with it. Only 10% of respondents were happy or very happy (note that about 8% of attendees don’t have search on their sites).

It’s exactly this discrepancy that spurred us to create Google Commerce Search last year. While the web as a whole is advancing at a staggering pace, online retailers are lagging behind in the overall quality and usability of their websites. As a recent Forrester study (see reference below) showed, 17% percent of frustrated consumers walk away from their online purchases, and 11% give up on shopping when unable to complete online research. Improving search - a key element on any website - can help bridge this gap and bring shoppers through the purchase cycle.

We hope you’ll join us next time to learn more about search and e-commerce, and in case you missed the webinar, you can catch the playback here.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Search team

"Web Sites That Don’t Support Customers’ Goals Waste Millions," Forrester Research, Inc., February 2010

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Tim Horton, Co-Founder and CEO of DiscountOfficeItems.com, one of the largest office supply superstores on the internet. Offering more than 65,000 name brand office supplies, technology products and office furniture, DiscountOfficeItems.com is an Inc. 500 and Internet Retailer Top 500 company.

In late 2009 Tim and his team identified search as a problem area for their site and began researching eTail search solutions. When they saw a demo of Google Commerce Search, they decided to switch and were able to integrate the new solution within their existing UI in less than a month. Almost immediately, they saw sizable lifts in revenue, traffic, transactions, and average order size.

Tim will join Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager at Google Enterprise on a live webcast Thursday, March 4 at 10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST to share his experience and answer questions about their decision to switch to Google Commerce Search.

When I co-founded Discount Office Items in 2003, our main objective was to offer customers a large selection, low prices, and top-notch customer service. Our site experienced rapid growth and high overall customer satisfaction, but our homegrown search was sluggish and returned irrelevant results.

In late 2009 we decided to evaluate Google Commerce Search and requested a demo. When we saw how fast we could recoup our spending and start making more money due to better, faster search, the decision to implement Google Commerce Search was clear. After the deployment process (which took just a couple of weeks including the winter holiday), we saw an immediate lift in revenue and traffic as well as transactions and searches done on our site.

More people are using our site search now to find the right products – Google Commerce Search works well and the results are highly relevant. Search was one of the weakest parts of our site. Now, it’s one of the strongest – all with less load on our servers and less time spent on maintenance for the IT staff.

Please join me and the Google Commerce Search team for this live webinar:

How Discount Office Items Increased Revenue 6% by Switching to Google Commerce Search
Thursday, March 4, 2010
10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST


You can contact our sales team, download the datasheet, or learn more on our website.

Posted by Eric Larson, Enterprise Search Deployment Engineer

Although it "makes sense" that good search can increase website ROI, especially for eCommerce websites, it's important to back that intuition with quantifiable data supporting the value of online research search. Thanks to recent research from Market Strategy Group, the evidence is in.

Market Strategy Group's new white paper, titled "Search for Revenue: Leveraging Powerful Search to Boost eTail Sales" shares a range of data indicating how adding or improving search capability on eTail sites can significantly raise revenues. The study covers why site search is more important today than ever before, and delves into the potential ROI companies can achieve by having advanced search on their eCommerce sites.

We're sharing firsthand perspecitves on that value in an upcoming webinar hosted by eCommerce specialists MultiChannel Merchant:

Search: adding real ROI to eCommerce websites
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST

During this hour-long webinar, you'll hear from:

• Leslie Bacon, Group Publisher at Penton Marketing Media Group, delivering insights on the online channel and how Multichannel Merchant is addressing the shift towards online sales
• Joyce Wu, Partner at Market Strategy Group, covering their recent white paper, Search for Revenue: Leveraging Powerful Search to Boost eTail Sales
• Vijay Koduri, Product Marketing Manager at Google Enterprise, discussing how Google Commerce Search addresses the problems of e-commerce site search speed and relevancy

All three speakers will answer audience questions as part of this event.

Register here. We hope you'll join us to get the facts on how effective search boosts results for online retailers.

Posted by Ashley Gorringe, Enterprise Search team

How can e-retailers surface product information and a vast number of product attributes for shoppers without sacrificing speed or relevance? In November, Google's enterprise search team launched a new website search option designed specifically for online retailers: Google Commerce Search. Since then, we've heard from many agencies, partners, and solution providers who wanted to learn more about the development and technical features of the product, because website search can present unique issues for online retailers.

If you're looking to dive a bit deeper into the technical side of Google Commerce Search, join us for a behind-the-scenes look in an interactive webinar in which Google's search product managers and engineers will review how Google Commerce Search works, address implementation and administrative questions, and discuss key product capabilities.

Google Commerce Search "Under the Hood"
Monday, February 1, 2010
1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST

This webinar will include a question and answer session. We hope you'll join us for this informative online event.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team