Google’s online shopping and comparing service -formerly known as Google Product Search- Google Products and Froogle has been announced to get a brand new design.
This will be reportedly the biggest mobile redesign that the company has made up to this day, and we guess that it was inspired by the shopping holiday season that will inevitably attract a larger number of online customers.
For the history, “Originally, the service listed prices submitted by merchants, and was monetized through AdWords advertising like other Google services. However, in May 2012, Google announced that the service (which was also immediately renamed Google Shopping) would shift in late-2012 to a paid model where merchants would have to pay the company in order to list their products on the service. [Wikipedia]”
Now, this radical change will be based on the concept that the service will be better used as an app with features that let you tap and swipe to navigate through its many pages rather than address consumers in shorter bursts on their smartphones.
An instance of this changes, is the reduction of search results, whenever a customer enters a broad search term. That doesn’t mean that some results will be tossed. The algorithm will simply be optimized to bring you the most relevant results to your search. Google Shopping will also show you the most commonly searched categories related to your search query, much like Google Images.
For example, if you type in “droids,” Google Shopping will return options like “Collectibles,” or “Dolls, Playsets, & Toys” as subcategories you can further explore.
Moreover, according to Google, the option to filter list that comes ups whenever you search for a specific item by attributes that people commonly shop for will be added, making your search a lot more personal.
To save time, shoppers can tap on a product, browse images, skim reviews, and read the product description without having to visit the retailer’s site. After that, they can dig deeper to the product’s info such as details, pictures and videos, without ever having to leave Google Shopping and visit a third-party app or service.
When you have decided the product that you want to buy, you can go to the online stores list to see which ones are nearby your area. An “available nearby” filter will be added to help highlight the stores in locations closer to you. After doing so, Google Shopping will switch over to a map view that shows all the closest stores that have the product, and their distance to you.
“Now the option to see your local retailers’ inventory is being surfaced upfront,” says Google. According to trustworthy sources, mobile searches with the term “near me” have increased by 34 times which shows why the company has worked on that aspect of the service that hard.