Google have officially announced the release of a hosted e-commerce platform that they are calling Google Commerce Search. Located on the Google cloud they have introduced themselves as a new player in the enterprise shopping cart solution market.
With yearly prices starting at $50,000 US it is definitely not something that will be enticing start-ups or small business operators. It will be interesting to see who takes up this offer with the ever-increasing concern that is creeping in over Google’s ever-increasing corporate power (did I hear anyone say monopoly) courtesy of the ever-increasing amounts of data they are able to control.
Google are claiming that through their intuitive search technology they will be able to increase user experience through:
- Enabling visitors to find the right products faster
- Filtering results by price, category, brand or other attributes
- Provide user-friendly synonyms and spelling options
- Increase website convergence and sales
- Booster will promote chosen products within the internal search results
- Deploy search solutions in days and scale effortlessly
- Customise, track and optimise performance
Looking over the bullet list above I must say that I am not seeing $50,000 per year in value just yet. Having your shopping cart application set up on Google’s infrastructure would definitely be appealing to some, however looking over their sales copy they appear to be focusing on their search technology as the major selling point. Once again, this could be very appealing to large e-commerce providers, if they are happy to hand over their data to Google!
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I wonder how these google sites will rank??