Emad Fanous

If you go to the Froogle homepage, you see example search terms under the search box:

E.g. “digital camera” or “car near San Francisco”

Note the “San Francisco” location modifier. I typed in that search and got a number of results. I noticed the search had defaulted to “Local Shopping” and separated by search box entry into two entries in two separate boxes: the keyword and the geography. I also noticed that they had a link to Online Shopping which represented their “non-local” results.

As with Google Local, it appears as if they had a few select providers give them listings (and is probably why the rumors were that they were asking for the listings). For cars, I see eDirection.com listings, with attribution. The icons open up information and even show the pictures from the data provider. Clicking on the listing takes you to the data provider’s site.

When I tried searching for router netted results for Circuit City and CompUSA, among others…companies who I know use Cross Media Services (check out their “interactive weekly ads”). Most people these days know Cross Media through a flanker brand known as Shop Local which has deals with many newspapers including the LA Times. (You might have also heard of Sales Hound which is another of their flanker brands).

Anyway, ShopLocal is providing the company name in bold red but they still get the traffic instead of that attribution since the links click through to them. They probably have less to worry about since they are one of only a few sites that collect product and location information nationally at a local level and own the direct relationships with the data providers (i.e. CompUSA) and the distribution channels (i.e. LA Times). I don’t know of many sites that do this at their scale. StepUp attempts to do this and lists the major stores in their results but I don’t think they have as many large distribution (not to mention I liked ShopLocal’s results and interface better).

The difference between ShopLocal and StepUp? Shoplocal already charges these data providers/advertisers for powering their online weekly ads (copies of their offline ads with a nice javascript and/or flash interface). StepUp takes more of a Froogle approach and builds online tools to feed your data in (but, unlike Froogle, it is with a small fee). StepUp also claims to provide results based on inventory…not just ads like ShopLocal. I have not tried it/tested it out but if it in fact does this, StepUp could limit your results to items that are currently in stock (it would suck to make a trip down to the local retailer only to find out they were out of the product you wanted). This should be the next logical step for Froogle’s Local feature.

However, this brings up another issue. The first item in the Google results for Shop Local, however, took me to an item that had expired. Not a good user experience. Oh well…it just launched and I’m sure it will get better (as will StepUp). This indicates a need for more frequent data pulls from ShopLocal into Google’s index. If you add the need for inventory awareness, this would only exacerbate the problem. What else is next? How about integration of Google Base?

…and don’t forget…all this focus on shopping is not by chance…we are in the shopping season!

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