If you run an eCommerce shopping site built from affiliate data feeds (and many of us do) then you’ve probably encountered that giant obstacle we often face with this “easy to use” catalog building architecture… the lack of ability to create a comprehensive inventory search feature for your visitors.

Since data feeds aren’t actually databases, and most CMS systems that import products from data feeds to build your site pages for you don’t do any sort of conversion on the data which would lend itself to creating a decent site search index, giving your customers the simple (and expected) ability to search your catalog can be a tough task even for those of us who program regularly, for the non-programmer it’s near impossible.

There are some 3rd party options, and Google’s site search service has been a long favorite in cases like this, but they’ve all basically been less than spectacular in performance.

Mainly due to the fact that only the pages of your site which were indexed by the search engine or service would be available to searchers, so some old and most new pages on your site wouldn’t appear in any results for your shoppers. Not good.

Especially when you figure in that most affiliate data feeds tend to update very often, sometimes daily. This means a huge chunk of your inventory was never being displayed to searchers on your site.

But, Andy Beal wrote a piece yesterday that has me uber-excited because it seems Google is providing an On-Demand indexing service for sites which use it’s site search service.

This means as soon as your affiliate data feed updates you can click a button and Google will revisit your site and index any new pages (and I assume deindex any removed pages) within a few hours.

If you’ve got a shopping site bilt from data feeds and you aren’t giving your visitors a comprehensive way to search your inventory, you are losing lots of money! With this new feature I feel comfortable saying Google’s site search service is probably worth the small fees to correct that now, so check it out.

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Technorati Tags: eCommerce, Google, site search

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Tags: eCommerce, Google, site search

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under eTailing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.