The professional products are currently very expensive and can not be afforded by small and mid-size merchants, but there are tendencies towards main stream adaptation. I saw already “semi-open source solutions” that seem to produce decent results.

I am convinced that it will become mainstream and the future and I believe that it will probably be referred to as a Web 2.0 feature on day as well. :)

See Faceted Classification to get an idea of the principle behind that.

This type of navigation becomes more and more popular with merchants. It’s easy to use, flexible and relevant. No pre-defined paths or hierarchy (e.g. static product categories)

See Walmart, eToys, BevMo.com, HomeDepot.com for example who are using products like Endeca Guided Navigation, Dieselpoint Faceted Navigation or Fast ESP Dynamic Drill-down for their faceted navigations.

Implementing those products really forces merchants to clean up their product attributes. Errors become much quicker visible and noticed with that type of navigation. If you use Froogle who had to “guess” the attributes for their faceted navigation, you will know what I mean.

With supporting those attributes, Google has to make less guessing and with increased accuracy of those properties on the merchant side are Froogle’s results also getting more accurate and have less “false positives” or “wrong guesses”.

Also see the notes to “Product Category” at my Merchant Product Datafeeds for Affiliates – 101 article. You can replace “Affiliate” with “Froogle” in most cases since it is technically the same thing.

The ability which Google gives these merchants with the new Google Base attributes is however, so much more powerful.

Think in terms of TickleMe Elmo. What if 100 merchants had Elmo’s description, price, product_type, and title uploaded, but only one has the different colors available?

As for the attributes such as “Department”, imagine a Google 3-D Virtural ‘Second Life’ style department store where users could scroll through the aisles and departments such as cosmetics (with no_animal_testing attribute), men’s, boy’s and others… while being able to purchase from ALL merchants which make up the virtual store via one Google Checkout purchase.

Such a user experience would be as efficient as it is exciting.

Someone said Zencart a while back but i don’t see anything in search for it.

Update: I found a few links for a google base script using Zen Cart.

google base script

google base script

Someone said Zencart a while back but i don’t see anything on searches for it.