uposCommerce Review: Google Store
One of the best indexed osCommerce online stores, and definitely with the highest rank in Google is Google Merchandise store.
On the splash page one can select the region of the world, and, should the user live in Europe, Africa, Asia, or Australasia - here we go, its a very basic looking osCommerce online store.
Only 6 top categories, quick search box, information pages, and currency selection box.
So what are the super exciting features of their osCommerce online store that we’d like to discuss in today’s review:
- Product Variations
In the list of Google merchandise for fun, you would perhaps put this Google Baby Creeper to the top position!
Interestingly enough, they list product variations on the main product’s page and allow for ordering several variations at once. This is a useful feature that can help any osCommerce web site to sell multiple product variations.
- Full product catalogue link, that list all products in the catalogue. They didn’t install any additional contribution for this, but rather used built in Advanced Search facility. In the following link they use “+” as a keyword, so that osCommerce lists all products at once:
http://www.google-store.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=+ - Funky buttons are used in this osCommerce installation. They may have been created by their design team, but also look similar to the following contribution called Aqua Buttons.
Interesting fact: almost on any page the most important button (i.e. the button that leads to a sale) is always red or bright blue. All other buttons are of other, more neutral, colours. This ensures the customer can not miss the “sale generating” button.
- Category-dependant page design
Their web masters use different CSS files for different categories. This feature is quite simple to implement, it must be several strings in the /includes/application_top.php file that determine which CSS file to use dependently on the cPath variable value. Just compare these two categories: Kids and Office - Checkout
Checkout procedure is modified. Its understandable that a web store like this will suffer a lot from multiple attempts of fake and fraudulent orders. So they modified checkout pages to only allow for entering one address that is used for both billing and shipping.For a UK address they allow for selecting between UPS Standard and UPS Express shipping methods.
Payment is made through “Secure Credit Card Payment”. Actually it is WorldPay, looks like a standard payment module for osCommerce. Interestingly enough they didn’t integrate Google Checkout payment method into this osCommerce installation.
Also, you do not type in your password when you go through the checkout process. It must be generated automatically on the purchase confirmation page, or maybe you just have to enter all your details each time you’d like to order something.
A couple of words on SEO. As far as we can see there were no attempts to optimize this osCommerce online store for search engines. We didn’t find any search engine friendly URLs, META tags were empty, and W3C validator gives 41 errors for the main page of the site.
Fortunately enough for this merchandise store it doesn’t matter Being an official merchandise store of Google, and having Google Page Rank 9 out of 10 it should be OK not to bother about SEO tricks.
Our impression of Google Store:
It sells Google merchandise and can not be mistaken for any other online store not only because of Google logos, but also because its design and user interface in general follow company’s user interface philosophy - a plenty of white space, solid blue, red, yellow, green colours, simplicity (even minimalism) and usability everywhere.
This osCommerce online store has nothing to do with the company’s main source of revenue, and is used mainly for PR. The online store sells unique products, and doesn’t really have to advertise those as the trade mark is already well known and advertised.
osCommerce based Google Store suits it’s purpose well.