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
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