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In A First, Google Does Real-time Joint Retail Trials
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March 18th, 2010
In the 15 or so years that we've had E-Commerce, the industry has seen quite a few improvements, but nothing that radically changed the way people shopped or retailers sold. Local inventory search, which today is not even in its infancy (not really even embryonic; it's more like a zygote), is likely to be the first truly dramatic shift.
Last Thursday (March 11), Google made a major—albeit extremely preliminary—move into local inventory search through a deal with a handful of major chains: Best Buy, Sears, Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn and the Vitamin Shoppe. But instead of working out this process internally and then bringing in retailers—or the reverse, with retailers figuring it out first—Google's objective is to run the earliest stage tests with various chains "so we're both learning how to do this in parallel," said Paul Lee, Google Product Search's business product manager.
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5 Comments | Read In A First, Google Does Real-time Joint Retail Trials
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March 18th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Interesting and natural move for Goggle given they already plot layers (e.g restaurants, gas stations) on top of maps on mobile devices. But Google is behind Shop Savvy in this product search effort. With the Shop Savvy mobile app, you use the phone camera to scan the product package barcode (UPC, etc.) and up pops a list of web and store competitors in the area also selling the same product, for how much, with customer reviews. Both solutions support consumer control over product information using mobile technology.
March 18th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Editor’s Note: Google also supports the barcode scan, as do many others.
March 18th, 2010 at 11:55 am
As mentioned, the key to satisfying consumer demand is “data normalization”. Normalization involves recognizing what are considered equivalent products. The challenge is that “equivalent” could mean something completely different to each consumer. You don’t need to know what the inventory is until you know what you want to buy. So before an inventory application is in place, a good product data base that allows consumers to search by product characteristics is necessary. Big retailers have already done this by allowing consumers to search by brand and major features such as LCD vs Plasma, screen size, etc. If the consumers are going to a retailer’s site to determine what they want, I am not sure how likely they are going to be to go somewhere else to screen inventory.
Amazon seems to have recognized this, combining a lot of the searching with links to various online retailers besides themselves. To that point, Amazon seems a better place to meet consumer demand for this type of service. Small brick and mortar retailers can load their inventory onto Amazon.
But in any case, the challenge is to avoid disappointing a consumer who jumps in their car and arrives at the store only to find the inventory is wrong or has been depleted.
March 18th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Goog point, Bill. All such displays should have a default note in prominent type: “Please call first.” On a mobile app–or just a site accessed via a mobile device–that can even be a link to the store’s listed phone number.
March 18th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
This may be more of a question… Recently launched POS SaaS offerings for small and mid-sized retailers (brick&mortar and webfront) are being reasonably quickly adopted. The retailer’s inventory is stored in the POS system on a “cloud server”, usually identified by the manufacturer’s SKU/barcode.
SMB inventory aggregating sites (e-stores)over the years have often required their own inventory recording in addition to the retailer’s own POS system. This never works.
However, if it was relatively simple to integrate an SMB SaaS POS system with a major search site like what Google is doing–wouldn’t that solve the problem of hyper local inventory discovery and management?