• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 7, 2010

Maybe ecommerce Web sites aren't as optimized as some retailers believe. Last week when Google introduced Commerce Search, an onsite search engine, the company launched a quick, informal Twitter poll looking for the best and the worst shopping experiences during Cyber Monday.

While plentiful deals from online retailers brought in a tad bit more than $1 billion in sales, according to comScore, the results of Google's poll suggests people were more frustrated with poor search on ecommerce sites than finding competitive and special prices.

Google's survey suggests 77% of consumers relied on search within ecommerce Web sites to find products. While 22% of consumers were most impressed by online retailers who had great deals, only 14% liked the fast and easy shopping experience.

About 11% of shoppers commonly cited difficulty finding items, 10% had shipping problems and 8% couldn't find enough good deals.

Of course, Google suggests the magic ticket to selling more goods resides in the ability for consumers to drill down layers into a Web site to easily find products. The second release of Commerce Search offers new features such as a merchandising dashboard that allows site administrator and marketers to control the appearance and ranking rules of search results.

Ranking rules gives added control over search results, ordering results by setting custom parameters for all queries, certain categories or search terms. Similar to Google's search tool on the Web, shoppers can search the first few letters of a search term and see a variety of options through auto completion.

Don't put all the responsibility on the on-site search functionality. Optimization should become similarly important. Michael Gray tells us how to optimize department and category pages with lots of products. He suggests serving the search engine bots a flat HTML file version with about 100 products, but serving up an Ajax version with 10 or 20 products to searchers, then use Ajax to reload/shift/change the products.

Marketers also need to evaluate the effectiveness of copy on the Web site to find the combinations of key terms and phrases that generate the best search results in the least amount of queries.

Optimizing conversions and improving the user experience also requires tool. In this case, some are free or inexpensive. They will help marketers collect qualitative feedback and objective data on factors affecting site visitors' experience.

The tools will help determine bounce rates, and why people might fill a shopping cart and abandon it. Have you polled existing and prospective customers to determine if they can quickly they find what they need? Certain tools may help you find out.