Google recently announced the launch of Google Commerce Search, an new customizable product search engine for e-commerce retailers. I watched the video and read a few blog posts, and it looked like yet another excellent Google service offering.
After seeing all the buzz over the last few days, I thought I’d check it out for my own e-commerce retailer, 2BigFeet.com. I visited the Google Commerce Search website only to discover that the starting price for the product is $50,000 per year.
Most small to medium sized e-commerce retailers don’t spend $50,000 on their entire IT system, including e-commerce software, web hosting, etc. Google has effectively priced themselves out of the market for most retailers.
Unfortunately, this is a huge disappointment coming from Google. As this is targeted towards retailers, I didn’t expect it to be a free service like Gmail, but did expect pricing to be more usage-based (like Amazon EC2 or S3 services). With a pricing beginning at $50,000 per year I wonder how many retailers will be using Google’s new service?
