Google Arms Retailers With Mobile Commerce Tools

Even with the holidays just around the corner, Google says there's still time for retailers to get their sites optimized for mobile e-commerce. That's why Google is signing up resellers to help push the use of Google Commerce Search.
Google is so sure that its solution allows for quick integration that it is urging smaller retailers to GCS-enable their mobile commerce sites in time to cash in on the 2011 holiday shopping season. The company expects that up to 15 percent of searches on Black Friday will happen on mobile devices.
GCS allows retailers to upload their inventories to the cloud and integrate Google's search technology, specialized for merchandizing, into their Website commerce platforms. With the 3.0 release of the two-year-old product, Google added features and templates to make GPS easier to integrate into mobile sites; its announcement last March claimed that one national retailer, GNC, had integrated Commerce Search into their mobile Website in one week.
Google opened signups for the GCS resellers program on Wednesday. The program encourages system integrators, digital agencies, and commerce platform providers to offer Commerce Search to their retail clients. Google is offering resellers discounts off the annual list price for GCS (which Clickz puts at $25K and up), technical and sales training, support, and marketing programs and collateral.
Many large retailers have enabled their shopping sites for mobile, but about 80 percent have not yet done so, according to figures quoted by Clickz. Google's reseller program should allow smaller retailers to avail themselves of Google's SaaS solution for product search. An analyst quoted by Clickz referred to GCS as "the GoDaddy for mobile commerce, [providing] cloud-based templates that let people customize quickly."
Among the mobile-friendly features enabled by GCS:

• Search completion: GCS can complete a product name or description after the user has typed a few characters -- a major benefit on a mobile device where typing is non-optimum.
• Automatic spellcheck: Also very handy when typing on a small piece of glass.
• Local inventory: Users can see whether products they find in a search are available in a store near them. This allows any retailer using GCS on a mobile site to get some of the advantages of a custom clicks-and-bricks integration such as that implemented by David's Bridal.

Other GCS features benefit any search for a retailer's products, not just mobile searches. Merchandising tools allow retailers to set query-based landing pages, and to create promotions that display alongside related search queries in retailer-designated banner areas. Product recommendations, showing what other people viewed and ultimately bought, are available in pre-beta ("Labs," in Google parlance), to help searchers discover related products.
The CMO Site spoke with Chris Mason, co-founder of Branding Brand, one of two launch partners in the GCS reseller program. Branding Brand has been using Google's platform since the beginning of 2011 and has integrated it into sites for Woodcraft, Timberland, The Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, and The Tile Shop, among others. I asked how big a retailer needed to be in order to consider GCS. Mason replied that candidates would be "anyone who is in the market for an enterprise search solution; they will probably be in the IR [Internet Retailer] 1000 and be doing millions in aggregate e-commerce in a year."
— Keith Dawson , Senior Editor, The CMO Site
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