Google Inc. announced that it has bought London-based firm Rangespan as a way to improve the Internet giant's ability to work with more retailers on inventory and product management.
The cost of the acquisition has not been revealed, according to PC Magazine.
As part of the purchase, Rangespan's employees, which include founders Ryan Regan and Matt Henderson, will be added to Google Shopping, the Internet company's e-commerce website. Regan and Henderson are former executives for Amazon.com.
"We are very happy to announce that Rangespan is joining Google," company officials wrote on the website. "We will continue to work on services for shoppers and retailers at Google, and we're super excited about the opportunities to come. As part of the change, we will wind down Rangespan's services. We've already begun working individually with each of our retailers and suppliers on this process."
A Google spokesman said Henderson and Regan will "be joining our shopping team to help us continue to improve our services for shoppers and retailers." He declined to comment further on the acquisition, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Rangespan was founded in 2011. The shopping analytics firm aimed to help retailers change their product range due to online demand. In order to reduce the cost of adding new products for sale, the company tracked and ranked hundreds of millions of products and changed the management of new suppliers.
The company currently uses its back-end solutions to help online retailers evaluate the market and better predict trending products and categories. Retailers then offer products as they begin to get popular, PC Magazine reported.
"Inventory suppliers uploaded their product feeds into Rangespan's portal, giving online retailers thousands of products to at their disposal," said Ginny Marvin of SearchEngineLand. "Retailers could choose which products to stock using Rangespan's search engine. Each product got assigned a 'RangeRank' score - its predicted sales potential based on customer behavior signals gathered from other search engines and shopping sites."
Google representatives have not revealed reasons for the purchase, but it has been guessed that the deal will help Google compete with Amazon in online shopping.
