Diane Buzzeo

With Google's search engine market share hovering near 70 percent, it comes as no surprise that the search giant plans to revamp its current e-commerce function to further wedge itself into the online shopping industry. Google has already started transitioning the old Google Product Search to the new Google Shopping, a commercial e-commerce marketplace allowing participating merchants to sell their products directly to consumers.

Consumers are increasingly looking to video to fulfill their information needs and Google is taking notice by allocating more of its search engine territory to video content and less to traditional web results. Although Google's integration of video has created more competition for plain-text results, it has opened the door for video assets to acquire coveted search engine rankings.

We live in a Google-dominated world; more accurately, we use a Google-dominated internet. The search engine (and purveyor of social media, cloud services and other daily necessities) accounts for over 80 percent of the online query market, making it safe to assume that it set the standard for internet search functions. When choosing to shop online, modern consumers expect no less from the search boxes of the virtual stores they're browsing than they do from King Google.

Most retailers are well aware of the enormous benefit of selling products on Amazon.com. Far and away the most dominant e-commerce site, Amazon reported net sales of $10.88 billion in the third quarter, a 44 percent increase vs. the same period last year. Amazon is simply the most powerful selling tool for any online retailer — and its influence just continues to grow.

The e-commerce landscape is shifting so quickly that keeping an online retail site updated and accessible has become a time-consuming and costly task for companies of all sizes. With tablets, touchscreens and an increase in mobile browsing, improving a company’s site can mean adding a multitude of new features and upgrades.