When potential customers land on your site, you need to provide a good search engine for them to locate products and information within your online store or website. Most small ecommerce sites use shopping carts to manage inventory, and the shopping cart software is also what drives the local website product search.
When you invest in your cart software, it is important to ensure that the site search offers more than just a basic text listing results page for matching your product to the customers' keywords. The search results page should show product images, and give customers options for sorting, product previews, and more. Of course, it also should never turn up a "no results found" page – instead, the search result should display related merchandise if it can’t find an exact match.
Outside of your ecommerce shopping cart software, small ecommerce site owners don’t really have many options for integrating alternative site search functionality, unless they have access to in-house technical know-how and a bigger budget to invest in developing on-site search.
While there are a number of hosted site-search platforms available, “commerce search” is still largely an enterprise application and few platforms are designed to meet the budget needs of the very small ecommerce websites.
One option that a small business has for improving on-site product search is using the free Google Custom Search or, you could invest in Google Site Search or Google Commerce Search, depending on the type of site you manage. Fair warning though: while Google’s Commerce Search is cheaper than many of its competitor’s search products, the pricing may still be out of range for many smaller ecommerce web shops.
The Google Search Options: Custom Search, Site Search and Commerce SearchGoogle Custom Search: Google’s site search offerings include different hosted search solutions. The first service, Google Custom Search is a free custom search for your website or blog. When using the Google Custom Search, you log in using your Google account and specify one or more websites to be searched when someone enters a search query into the Google box on your site.
The actual search box is hosted on your own site, with Google taking care of the search traffic. The Google Custom Search does allow you to customize the look and feel of the results to match your site. Once you have customized the Google Custom Search, you will need to copy and paste the provided code to your own website.
It's important to remember that this is a free service, and ads will also be served up with the search results. If you don't use AdSense, you may not like the idea of the ad-based search results page.
Google Site Search: This is a hosted search solution designed for business websites. You can create and customize the search by uploading your company logo and changing colors on your search results pages to better match your site's design.
Google Site Search is a paid hosted service, so the search results are ad-free. You also have a lot more features available with this type of search. You can make refinements to help categorize search results, target the top search results from specific sections of your website and enable search features like synonyms and multiple language support.
Pricing for Google Site Search is based on the number of Web pages that are indexed by the search and a search query limit. For example, if your website has up to 1,000 pages and the number of search queries in a year is 250,000 or less, then it would cost $100 per year for Google Site Search. Small businesses would be looking at $250 per year up to $2,000 for medium-sized websites.
Google Commerce Search 2.0: This is a newer hosted-search option designed to handle the special requirements of an ecommerce website with a product catalog. This Google search option includes a lot of ecommerce features. Creating a Google Commerce Search requires you to submit your product data to the Google Merchant Center and Google Product Search then customize the search.
When administrating the search options, Google also provides a merchandising dashboard to customize the ranking of search results, filtering options and promotions. You can also access advanced reporting and analytics to see top queries and product promotion clicks.
Unfortunately, ecommerce search again comes at a high price. The pricing model for Google Commerce Search is based on the number of products in your catalog and the number of search queries entered on your site each year. You can expect pricing to start at $25,000 per year.
Is Google Search Right for Your Ecommerce Site?The smallest of ecommerce sites are still quite limited in terms of site search, where the function is provided through the shopping cart software. The free Google custom search may not be a search option that you would associate with an ecommerce site because it won’t show customers relevant shopping information, like the product images, shipping details or price -- leaving this search option best-suited to small businesses that do not have an online product catalog.
Still, if your ecommerce platform site search is not up-to-par and you cannot afford to invest in a new shopping cart with a more fully-featured search function, this is a second search option you can give to customers to help them find exactly what they are looking for on your website. If you are considering using the Google Custom Search you should consider upgrading to the paid Google Site Search solution to have ads removed and to access more customization and features.
Obviously the Commerce search is best for those with an online ecommerce store, but again, pricing will prevent small shops from using this solution.
The best advice for small ecommerce site owners: ensure that the ecommerce software you choose offers commerce search functionality that you will be happy with.
Small ecommerce shop owners can start small and work their way up to affording a bigger and better site search. Invest in your website design, online marketing and SEO tactics to increase traffic and your profits first. Then you can look at incorporating better, more fully-featured commerce search for your site when your ecommerce business can afford to make the upgrade.
Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.
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