Little more than a month after the holidays, many consumers probably still have psychic scars from the jammed malls and parking lots. Those memories may make them good prospects for a couple of schemes designed to let shoppers browse store inventories from their PCs or mobile phones.
Boston-based Yokel.com and NearbyNow of Mountain View CA are both taking advantage of a trend e-commerce researchers have noted over the past year: Many shoppers are gathering product data online but making actual purchases in stores.
That impulse is what drove Don Zereski, Yokel.com's co-founder and vice president of products, to begin looking at a truly location-based shopping search engine in 2004. Specifically, he tried general searches on both Yahoo! and Google for a snow blower and some women's golf clubs — two items you don't want to order on the Internet — and found no relevant local results among a pile of useless Web pages.
“That told me there was an opportunity for a site specifically focused on local shopping,” he says.
Launched last May as a Web site, Yokel (tagline: “All shopping, all local”) pulls its database of products and stores from online and offline sources. In early December it added new capabilities that let local users do shopping search from mobile smart phones such as the Treo, BlackBerry and Motorola's Q.
People with the right phones — always an issue in mobile services — can access a Yokel search page optimized for handheld devices. They enter an item or product category in a search query, get a list of the stores in their area carrying what they're seeking, and call the store by clicking on the phone number.
“The biggest challenge continues to be assembling the database of local stores and what they carry,” Zereski says. “We've done that and today have the largest database of that kind in the world, with 315,000 store locations and about 800 million products.” Yokel started with the large retail chains, getting their inventory information either from data feeds or from spidering their Web sites.
For the independent retailers and mom-and-pop stores in an area, Yokel approaches the most researched product brands, finds the dealers they're delivering product to, and starts compiling store profiles. Down at the level of your local hardware store, Yokel may not know all the items or brands it carries, but it will probably at least have tagged the spot for product categories.
NearbyNow.com is hoping to do a successful end-run around that national database problem thanks to a laser-like focus on certain shopping malls — four in California and one in Arizona, at press time, with plans for 15 more by April.
Building and optimizing Web sites for specific mall clients seemed the most practical approach at the company's launch last August, says CEO/founder Scott Dunlap. Not only does it simplify database building, but folks headed for malls have a built-in buying intention. Also, bringing mall inventories online could streamline national expansion, since the top four mall developers own major properties around the country.
In December, NearbyNow took the further step of taking its search service mobile. Unlike Yokel's service, NearbyNow users can send a text message to the short code “Nearby,” which is displayed on signs around the mall. They can then type in a text search for their product and find out which stores in a mall carry that brand.
Right now, retail marketers are drawn more by NearbyNow's Web search ability than by the mobile features it offers shoppers. But Dunlap is betting that'll change. “In two years, I'm sure the mobile solution will dwarf the Web solution.”
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Driving Traffic
Shoppers who use the posted short codes to opt in to NearbyNow's mall-centric shopping search can receive ads and special offers via SMS, such as a free iTunes card for purchases at a selected merchant during a specific period of time, say the next 20 minutes. “You could look across the mall and watch people pick up their phones, read the message, then turn and start making their way to the store,” says CEO Scott Dunlap. Ads stop 90 minutes after opt-in, when shoppers are assumed to have left the mall.
— BQ
