Google's New Ecommerce Search Service is Priced to Sell

Maybe it doesn't qualify as the sale of the century, but Google has improved its six-month-old ecommerce search product and sliced the cost in half - to $25,000 per year. Not exactly a drop in the bucket, but Google is hoping the new platform and price tag will invite at least a look from ecommerce businesses not counted among the top 1,000 revenue-producers.

So, while you're getting your checkbooks, here's a list of some of the new features for Google's Commerce Search 2.0:

• New merchandising dashboard: Gives merchants more control over promotions, search-ranking rules and filtering. Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves without requiring custom codes. New retailer controls such as time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters and simple product-ranking rules allow seasonal optimizations to be done on the fly.
• Improved search quality: Retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time without any custom coding with the new query auto-completion. Search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. New spelling and stemming dictionaries and custom synonym options make shopping on a retail site as easy and accurate as searching on Google.
• Better browsing and navigation: Consumers can shop by browsing on a retail site as well as searching directly for products.

Since the launch of the first version of Commerce Search last year, businesses such as Birkenstock, SmartFurniture, Coveroo and DiscountOfficeItems have used the product to integrate powerful search into their ecommerce sites. Other companies that offer ecommerce search platforms include Omniture, Endeca and IBM.