Milo, a startup that highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices, has struck a deal with comparison shopping site PriceGrabber today. The nature of the deal allows PriceGrabber to list the local brick and mortar stores where products are available within a search for a product.
Milo.com tracks the real-time availability and prices of more than 3 million products at over 50,000 stores across the U.S. And the PriceGrabber deal is the first use case of Milo’s technology on other shopping platforms. Now, when shoppers go to PriceGrabber and search for an item, they’ll see a “Check Local Availability” button at the bottom of the results if the item is available locally. Clicking that returns local results that are powered by Milo, who gets paid by PriceGrabber on a cost-per-click basis. So far, almost 1 million products have been integrated between Milo and PriceGrabber.
Milo (and now PriceGrabber) are capitalizing on growing trends online to offline shopping. Forrester reports that the “online research, offline buying” consumer market represents $917 billion in consumer spending, which is 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales. Online, e-commerce spending accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. sales.
Google recently entered the space with the launch of its Blue Plate Specials feature, but Milo seems to be confident that it can survive with the search giant as a competitor.