Reuters reported that Google said it would begine selling Google Commerce Search at a starting price of $50,000 a year. The product allows online retailers to have Google operate the search capabilities for retail sites on Google’s own cloud-ased computers, using a data feed that the retailers provide it of their product catalog.
Google, the leading search engine for Web pages, can perform searches of a retailer’s catalog significantly faster and better than what is currently available on many retail sites, according to Google Enterprise Search Lead Product Manager Nitin Mangtani. “Retailers convinced me that there’s a need for this type of product,” Mangtani said, adding that sluggish search performance on retail sites can send shoppers elsewhere and hurt a retailer’s sales conversion rates.
The $50,000annual price includes up to 10 million search queries, Mangtani said. The price for retailers whose sites have a volume of more than 10 million will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, he said.
While Reyters quotes Gartner analyst Van Baker who said a recent study by his group found that very few large Internet retailers plan to make any changes to their basic e-commerce technology and “there’s not a whole lot of evidence that they’re looking to switch,” the GoogleGazer thinks many of the large and mid-sized retailers will find it very cost-effective to switch. No chance however, that the Amazon’s and Wal-Marts of the world will switch, as they have the infrastructure, resources and corporate egos that rule out any prospect of outsourcing to Google.
Mangtani thinks there is plenty of demand from the top 1,000 retailers in key markets like the United States and Western Europe. Footwear maker Birkenstock USA is the first customer officially using the product and Mangtani said a “good number” of retailers have been testing it over the past three or four months.
Of course, if a lot of retilers end up using the product, Google will have an interesting window into on-line buying habits, and in the long run that will be worth more to them than the revenue from hosting.
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