What lies at the soul of an e-commerce website? "It's the search engine," according to Nitin Mangtani -- not a surprising answer coming from a group product director for Google. But in his educational session at this week's NRF convention in NYC, Mr. Mangtani did put forth a convincing argument to retailers that nothing satisfies a customer better than a well-executed product search.
After all, Mr. Mangtani, asked, "What's the first thing a shopper does when she hits your website? What do you do when you go to a retail website?" In most cases, he contends, consumers look for a search box. That prompted the first of the session's "search insights": position your search box prominently. Too many retailers, perhaps due to a sort of inferiority complex, hide underperforming search boxes in the upper right corner of website pages, he contends.
Once found and put to work, retail website search engines should aspire to deliver speed, efficiency and interactive customer experiences, according to Mr. Mangtani. How fast is fast? Just a few years ago, searching for say a digital camera and getting a list of results in three seconds would have been perfectly acceptable. Today, it better be a "sub-second" result, according to Mr. Mangtani -- perhaps 300 to 500 milliseconds.
Google's offering to retailers in this field is a plug-in version of its search technology that has taken the world by storm. It's called Google Commerce Search 2.0, in its latest iteration, and is a SaaS (software-as-a-service) product, therefore offering retailers the advantages that come with cloud-based computing: plug-in ease; zero-overhead; and quick start up.
But where the leverage of Google's massive data and hardware resources gives it an upper hand is in producing "query suggestions" -- those auto-generated lists that scroll down when you begin typing your search keywords. According to Mr. Mangtani, this type of "machine learning," to be done properly, needs to draw from a huge consumer-spawned database. With Google, that's on the magnitude of billions of queries -- a rich repository from which the shopper can be reminded or pointed towards what they are seeking. Plus, speed is doubly important in this situation since responses must occur on each keystroke. (Now we're talking about 10 milliseconds.) Again, Google has the machine power to zip data back and forth to its SaaS "cloud" with this type of efficiency.