Google Gets Into The Shopping Cart Business With Commerce Search

Google has just announced a new enterprise search service called Commerce Search. The name might remind you of Froogle, but this is not that kind of commerce/product search. With Commerce Search, Google has created what is essentially a shopping cart solution for online retailers.

Commerce Search, as Google describes it, promises to improve an e-commerce web site’s search and usability. It’s hosted on Google’s servers, and — like any good shopping cart software — offers a variety of customization options, including look and feel, product promotions, and more. Commerce Search also includes some Google search technologies like spellcheck, stemming, and synonym matching, and is integrated with Google Analytics by default.

When combined with Google Checkout — as shown in the introductory video (also embedded below) — this is nothing short of an all-inclusive e-commerce software package. Retailers upload their product data to Google, then customize the search/e-commerce options, and end up with a Google-hosted shopping cart. Pricing is based on how many products/SKUs in the retailer’s data feed, and how searches are done on the retailer’s store.

Here’s Google’s brief introductory video about Commerce Search.