Milo.com Inc., which enables consumers to search for products from local bricks-and-mortar retailers on the web and mobile devices, has struck a deal that will allow comparison shopping site PriceGrabber.com Inc. to list bricks-and-mortar stores where products are available.
Milo.com tracks the availability of more than 3 million products at more than 50,000 bricks-and-mortar stores across the United States. At launch about 1 million of those products are integrated on PriceGrabber.
PriceGrabber will pay Milo on a cost-per-click basis for most products and a cost-per-acquisition for retailers that allow consumers to buy online and pick up the item in a bricks-and-mortar store.
The deal marks the first time Milo is integrating its technology onto another comparison shopping platform. However, Jack Abraham, Milo founder and CEO, says the company has more deals in the works.
The deal will provide value to retailers by helping them bridge the online and offline retail environment, he says.
“It’s exciting in that we’re merging the online and offline shopping worlds,” says Abraham. “Sites used to be just about online shopping, search and content, but now we can help connect them with the real world.”
When a consumer searches for a product on PriceGrabber—or the other shopping sites in its distribution network, such as AOL Shopping and Yahoo Shopping—she can click a “Check Local Availability” button at the bottom of the results page. Those local results will be powered by Milo and will allow the consumer to click to find a retailer’s web site.
Milo hopes that the increased exposure from integrating with PriceGrabber will help further its ambition to be the “Amazon of local shopping,” says Abraham.
“If you think about the way most people think about online shopping they generally think of Amazon,” he says. “If you ask them where they go for online auctions, they think of eBay. If they want to buy a local, used item, they think Craig’s List. But there’s no similar site people think of for buying local, new items. That’s the niche we want to fill.”