MotorcycleSuperstore factors cost basis, add-ons in buying new site search
While it can be tempting to go for all the bells and whistles when it comes time to buy new technology to support a major site redesign, a retailer’s challenge is to scale the cost of such purchases to the expected return. For Motorcycle Superstore Inc., shortly to relaunch its e-commerce site, that meant bypassing site search solutions from dedicated vendors that offered more than it needs at this point in its development, and instead buying the Google Search Appliance to power search on its new site.
Don Becklin, CEO, cites several factors in that purchase decision. Part of it was based on potential add-on costs of customizing other vendors’ software packages to do what Mortocycle-Superstore.com, No. 310 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, needs site search to do. The retailer sells a broadly assorted range of products ranging from apparel to motorcycle parts and Becklin wanted the flexibility to adjust search to different product search needs.
“All of the suppliers said they could do that. But we are aware of how much programming time it takes to do things, and we figured that eventually, it would come down to us doing our own custom programming, one way or another. So we asked ourselves, can we start with a more affordable solution and get our guys to tune it to exactly what we want in-house,” he says. Becklin said the site has been using the Google Mini, scaled to smaller operations, for site search.
Becklin adds that some of the site search software solutions from other suppliers would have meant changing more on the new site than he wanted to. “They had whole site hierarchies built in, with guided navigation. But we’ve always tried to build good navigation. We were primarily looking for a good search algorithm and we thought the Google algorithm was the best to begin with,” he says.
With some of the considered solutions charging per SKU, cost basis was another factor in right-sizing the purchase of a solution to power search on the new site. “We have 150,000 SKUs,” he says. “We had a ton of SKUs we’d get charged on. We’d be going with a solution that might have been built for a Sears rather than a mid-level or smaller retailer like ourselves.”
The Google Search Appliance, a hardware and software product that spiders a site the way Google spiders crawl the web, starts at $30,000 for 500,000 searches. Becklin says he doesn’t rule out going with a dedicated site search solution vendor in the future. However, “the size of our business is going to have to grow to be able to make that purchase not so cost-prohibitive,” he says.
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