Sharing with you the stories that I’m reading today. Some notes on Gap International, Google makes a retail-related acquisition, and links to good resources for e-commerce developers.
The always terrific Get Elastic blog has an excellent roundup of 22 features of e-commerce site search. The terrific review of a variety of search options and search results from different e-commerce stories is really helpful. Site search is a very important, and sometimes overlooked, area of e-commerce implementations. The Get Elastic blog post should inspire some conversations about ways to improve your search.
Seeking Alpha has some notes on Gap’s Q2 results and their international strategy. Australia, China, and Italy will all see new Gap and/or Banana Republic stores this year. I don’t blame Gap for expanding internationally as that division has been on fire this year. According to my tracking, the international division has seen only one month of negative comps this year; everything else has been flat or positive.
Google makes a big splash by buying visual search engine like.com. Great deal for Google, probably an even better deal for like.com. I’d love to see what Google Product Search will look like after the like.com engine is integrated.
Finally, Practical E-commerce has another good article discussing the pros and cons of different checkout methods. More food for thought for developers and designers.
