Local retailers are increasingly going beyond store locators to drive sales. The extensions to store locators include brand locators, coupons, menus, trip planners, and even guides to where Wi-Fi, nonsmoking and RV parking can be found.

A leading vendor in providing retailer solutions is Anaheim, California-based Where2GetIt. Roughly 280 companies and 550 brands are using Where2GetIt today, representing 700,000 brick-and-mortar locations. These include manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and agencies.

Brands that use Where2GetIt include such mainstays as Office Depot, Hancock Fabrics, Columbia Sportswear, Mountain Hardwear, Patagonia, Monster Cable, Mitsubishi Digital, Sony, ViewSonic, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Applebee’s, White Castle and Cracker Barrel. I ran across the firm looking for an Alpine car stereo, for instance.

The 25-person company got its start in 1997, when it won an assignment from Seiko to build online maps showing where its watches could be bought. Since then, Where2GetIt has extended its “locator” capabilities to a wide range of brand-specific products.

It provides a “turkey locator” for Popeyes Fried Chicken, a “running locator” for Reebok, a “pie locator” for Bakers Square and a “job locator” for recruitment firms. What ties them all together is a focus on helping consumers find brand-name products.

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel says the firm’s “Business Locator” continues to be the firm’s mainstay — typically one of the two most used features on a retail Web site. But the supplemental products have become increasingly important to the firm’s business model, which is based on licensing. For instance, adding coupons to Popeyes’ site doubled the chain’s Web site traffic, he says.

The firm’s other services tendered tend to be more strategic (i.e. future oriented). Firms such as Office Depot, for instance, use Where2GetIt’s mobile products. They include mobile locators, mobile browsers, SMS text messaging and toll-free 800 interactive voice response.

The firm is also heavily engaged in site analytics to drive sales conversion. “We try to figure out how far people will drive” using crowd sourcing and other techniques, says Patel.

The balance between merchants and brands is being shifted by the increasingly common use of enhanced “product locators,” which adds store locations, maps — and frequently promotions such as coupons — to the mix, says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group in Chicago.

Freedman has just completed a round of shopper behavior research for Krillion. The results, not surprisingly, reinforce Krillion’s mission of providing brand information, and now actual store inventory, to local shoppers.

The research’s key finding is that shoppers want to “see everything” and will look at multiple sources on the Web to find it, says Freedman. They especially want to shop online and pick it up at the store. She finds that merchants benefit from store pickup because consumers invariably add more to their shopping cart once they’re inside the location. On average, for instance, Circuit City brings in an extra $154 from such “cross-channel” shoppers.

Cross-channel shopping is increasingly being enabled by big-box stores, she adds. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sears, RadioShack, CompUSA each launched in the past six months. Increasingly, it is also having an impact on Main Street stores as well. Fifteen of 75 retailers surveyed, or 20 percent, now have a product locator on their site. A similar number had store pickup. “It is growing really fast. No one had it 18 months ago,” she says.

Freedman’s research also found that ratings and reviews are increasingly important, especially as the “local component” of the shopping experience. Generally speaking, women have especially seized on reviews, while men are more tied to the search engines.

“What people really want to know is the service element,” says Freedman. Besides price and inventory, “it is the only differential” at the local retail level.

Last week at SES New York, I had the chance to catch up with Alex Muller, CEO of new mobile shopping search product Slifter.

The mobile application allows users to search for products that can be found in local stores, including how many are on the shelf. To do this, it works with big-box retailers such as Best Buy to pull in their retail feeds and make them searchable in a mobile application interface.

This takes the opportunity being tapped by Krillion, NearbyNow and a few others and brings it to the mobile device in a different way (NearbyNow has SMS-based product search). The opportunity, in a nutshell, is to build products that take the reality to heart that the majority of U.S. retail activity happens offline in physical stores (as opposed to e-commerce). Effectively leading these offline conversions and tracking them with things such as coupons, or reserve online, is the goal.

Slifter brings an added dimension to the opportunity given that the phone is present when the consumer walks in the store, allowing the potential for more effective tracking (think mobile coupons or saving search results on the phone).

Having local product search take place on the phone also extends the use case beyond searching at home to include more serendipitous or on-the-fly product searches while out on the town. This makes a lot of sense in certain use cases, such as holiday shopping, where finding a hot item in stock, while scrambling around town to find it, can be a valuable proposition.

Muller explained how the flat screen television in Slifter’s booth at SES was found at a Circuit City in Manhattan using the product. The price it was able to find was cheaper than what was actually on the floor because of a brand-new promotion, which Slifter picked up before the floor sales associate knew about it.

“We brought the phone in and showed them and they didn’t believe it until they checked their system to see with surprise that the item had just been marked down,” said Muller. “Someone at Circuit City corporate had decided they wanted to move this product and we knew about it before the floor sales rep did.”

This opportunity will grow as mobile search adoption itself does — a result of improving standards and more mainstream penetration. As we pointed out last week, mobile and local are inherently related and many of the adoption increases and product developments expected in mobile will involve local search.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the Easter holiday talking with friends and family about the economy and how they are dealing with the budget crunch we are all experiencing. One of the common threads of all these conversations has been the need to stay close to home, combine shopping trips and call ahead so you don’t waste time and fuel going to multiple stores. 

More and more people are scaling back vacations and long car rides to try to save money. The next logical question is how people are adapting to this need to stay close to home and make every trip more efficient. Many of my friends and family admitted to using the print and online Yellow Pages more frequently as well as local search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Citysearch because of the mapping features and more detailed information about the stores they were searching for. One friend admitted that if the ad or online profile page content was not specific enough, they moved on, which shows how valuable content is in driving leads. 

Almost everyone I spoke with was calling stores more often to check on availability, price and specific location before they left the house so they had a better plan of where to shop and how best to combine trips. One family member was even reserving merchandise on the phone so they could just pick it up to save even more time. Mapping, it turns out, is becoming a key advantage for online sites as was location specific information and maps in print. 

What does all this mean to Yellow Pages? If the trend is toward more local shopping and the need for directions, local business information and local contact information, then directional media such as Yellow Pages and local search are best suited to address these changing consumer behaviors. These suspicions were confirmed by a more scientific study conducted by Vertis Communications that focused on changing buying habits of grocery shoppers. The study echoes my less than scientific conclusions.

“Economic factors, such as gas prices and the housing market, are changing shoppers’ habits drastically,” says Scott Marden, director of marketing research at the Baltimore-based Vertis. “More than 90% are affected, and many are shopping closer to home, stocking up more and combining shopping trips.” 

Perhaps there is a silver lining for Yellow Pages and other local media in this new economic environment if they can get their reps tuned into this new phenomenon and effectively communicate the opportunity to local business owners.

Last week, Krillion took an evolutionary step by feeding its local product listings into TheFind.com. — essentially becoming a data provider, in addition to a local product search destination.

After talking with Krillion CEO Joel Toledano last week, it became clear that this is only the beginning of the company’s march toward feeding its content and product (and inventory) search capability to other well-traveled local product search destinations. Tomorrow it will announce that Panasonic’s manufacturer Web site is next on the list.

Since Krillion launched last year, it has paid close attention to the reality that the vast majority U.S. retail activity happens offline while an increasing stake is influenced by online search ($470 M according to eMarketer). The company is among the handful of others (i.e., NearbyNow, StepUp Commerce) whose product development takes this reality to heart.

This includes individual optimized pages for millions of products (mostly in the home appliances and consumer electronics categories), searchable inventory, and reserve online and pick up in store features (proved very popular and successful for some big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Circuit City).

So for Krillion, these distribution deals will put its technology in front of more consumers than would have been possible on its destination alone. More distribution deals will follow, as will new product categories that are particularly conducive to an in-store pickup (think high-ticket, heavy or visually oriented items). This will involve a rev share with the distribution partner for commissions gained on the sale of items.

“With all of our retailers today, we are averaging a 4 percent commission on the sale,” says Toledano, “and we’re talking big-ticket items like flat screen televisions. The distribution deals going forward will be done on a revenue share.”

The integration with Panasonic’s store locater and product search functionality will be particularly powerful, according to Toledano, because of the inclination of consumers near the end of the buying cycle to go to manufacturer Web sites to search for specific products by name to buy locally. The functionality and data quality on these sites, however, is usually poor, representing a missed opportunity.

Deals going forward will involve both Krillion feeds that are pulled in and displayed in the distribution partners’ own interface (as done in TheFind.com) and those for which Krillion “powers” their local product search interface (as done with Panasonic). Expect many more to follow.

I just got off the phone with Pasadena, California-based Interpolls. The company has a number of rich media ad products and national brand ad clients, including HP, Scion and T-Mobile (full list here).

The company’s newest ad format is a widget-like product that brings polls into the mix. This places polls within banner ads to generate and qualify traffic for its advertisers. Though this polling data can be valuable for marketers, the functionality is used more to engage online shoppers.

Users are given the overall poll results after they vote on something related to a product (i.e., What is your cat’s favorite thing to do? A. eat B. sleep C. play). So it’s supposed to be a fun thing to do for users, who can see how their answer stacks up to overall results. This is also a way for advertisers to generate traffic and qualified leads of people who engaged with their ad.

More importantly, users are sometimes sent coupons or other calls to action. Voting on computing-based questions within an HP ad, for example, will target various product listings in a separate window that comes with a link to a Web site as well as “add to cart” functionality.

For lots of Interpolls’ target verticals, including consumer electronics, movie tickets and autos, there is a clear opportunity to combine this impression-based advertising with local directional advertising and to bring qualified users further down the purchase funnel. In the case of client Scion, this includes a dealer locater, according to Interpolls President Peter Kim, and there are many other possibilities.

Kim also points out that ad serving widgets across content networks is generally difficult because those widgets are seen as “fourth party” content that is generally not approved. This often requires partnering with an approved ad serving provider. Interpolls is already approved across a vast publisher network and is essentially integrating this polling functionality to its existing distributed client ads.

The company’s ads are also HTML-based unlike the majority of display ads, which are in flash. HTML, according to Kim, offers a lot more flexibility for switching poll questions and seasonal offers than flash does. The local implications will become clearer as Kim and company continue to develop the widget strategy and bring in more advertising clients in the verticals where products are mostly bought and sold offline.

Interactive Local Media: 07 is ready to roll Nov. 28-30 in L.A. That’s next Wednesday through Friday!

The show, which is being produced in partnership with SES Local, has attendees from all over the world. One exec told me he is coming on Wednesday, taking the red eye to New York that night due to a prior commitment, and flying back on Thursday night for the final day.

Attendance-wise, we have the biggest sign-up list for a Kelsey event since the mid-1990s. Almost everyone that we have slotted will actually be there. While the agenda has been tight for some time, with 70-plus speakers, here are some last minute adds:

• Christophe Maire, a cofounder of Nokia’s Location-Based Experience Development, is set for Day 3. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Nokia’s $8.1 Billion purchase of NavTeq.

• Laurel Gilbert, from Microsoft’s Atlas division, is speaking on our localizing national advertising panel. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: How Microsoft will use Aquantative to transform itself into a true Web advertising giant.

• Doug Kilponen from MerchantCircle is speaking on the localized shopping panel. MerchantCircle just received a $10 million cash infusion from IAC and others. HOT DISCUSSION TOPIC: Best Practices for Signing up Small Businesses.

• Claudia Poepperl from mobilePeople is set to provide a demo of the London-based company’s cutting-edge social mobile technology.

We are also expecting a drop-in from a top executive of a company that’s been in the news, but we can’t say much more about it. And speaking of news, there are lots of interesting news announcements that will drop around the show as well. So, will we see you in L.A.? Here is the registration page.

I received an e-mail early this morning from Judy’s Book COO Chris DeVore saying that the company will wrap up operations. This comes as a surprise, because it was in the middle of a model transition from review-centric local social search to one built around local shopping search and coupons.

The new model seemed to have potential in this growing area that includes ShopLocal, NearbyNow and Krillion. I hope to find out more about the rationale for the decision, and some information is provided by CEO Andy Sack on his personal blog.

You also might remember that Sack was very open with public statements on his blog last October, about what aspects of the site’s former review-centric model didn’t work. That forthrightness was a breath of fresh air in a market otherwise filled with positively charged marketing rhetoric.

I look forward to any learnings we can all take away from this event, and the hindsight of Judy’s Book’s model and site development. Local shopping search and local social search are indeed areas filled with opportunity but equally weighed down by question marks.

Judy’s Book was among the small graduating class of review sites that entered the market a few years ago, including Insider Pages and Yelp. Yelp of course is going strong (the “last one standing,” according to Techcrunch), while Insider Pages was acquired by Citysearch last spring.

Still a lot of opportunity here though, and growing consumer expectations around reviews and user-generated content. Also a few interesting models we’re seeing developed around review aggregation (OpenList), automated ratings (Grayboxx) and local social tagging (Yellowbot).

Monetization, as always, is the tough part. User-generated content in some ways should be used to grow and retain traffic that is monetized in other ways. In other words, as we’ve said before, user-generated content will slowly become a standard in local search, but one that is a feature layer in most destinations, rather than a standalone feature of a few.

Best of luck to Andy, Chris and the rest of the team in their transitions to whatever is next.

Shopping search site Krillion announced today that it will launch a new feature that includes inventory data for its top retailers. The feature, known as StockCheck, will launch initially in its flat screen television category.

Based on the same logic that drives Krillion’s consumer value proposition, the thought is that most conversions happen offline (especially for high consideration items like appliances and flat screens), while an increasing amount of research is being done online.

The new feature brings this to the next logical step. Backing this up, CEO Joel Toledano in a conversation last week cited success metrics for some retailers that have already integrated inventory data, and buy online/pick up in store options. This includes Circuit City, which has 50 percent of its online purchases (accounting for $500 million in sales last year) reserved and picked up in stores, and Wal-Mart, which has about 30 percent of its online purchases picked up. (See recent NYTimes piece).

This also gets customers into stores to buy complementary products, which has led to larger average purchases per customer with these offline pickups, when compared to Web only (delivered) purchases. Specifically, Circuit City pickups averaged $154 more than e-commerce purchases, while Wal-Mart store pickups averaged $60 more than online only.

Closing the Loop

With StockCheck, Krillion will jump on this opportunity — driven partly by the demand to avoid shipping costs — while having the additional appeal of being a one-stop shop for lots of retailers. The hope is that this will make it easier for users to reserve items they want; more attractive to advertisers (more conversions is the idea); and better for Krillion’s ability to close the loop on the traditionally challenging lead tracking from online research and search to offline conversion.

Along these lines it will employ a CPA revenue model where it will get a 3 percent to 5.5 percent commission on purchases (rather than clicks). Toledano claims retailers will be more than willing to pay this for sales: “Retailers are very willing to pay through the nose for completed sales,” he says.

This will most likely come down to a question of whether retailers will perceive these sales/online reservations as incremental to their own online efforts, or overlapping. We’ll have to wait to see the data, or any lift in sales and, more importantly, how well this resonates with retailers as Toledano says it will.

Joining the Pack

This joins similar features in other horizontal segments by StepUp, ShopLocal and NearbyNow. By horizontal, I mean Krillion plays in high-consideration appliances and consumer electronics, while StepUp plays in the SMB segment, ShopLocal in big box, and NearbyNow in shopping mall retailers.

This makes StockCheck more supportive of these other offerings — pushing the medium forward, and users’ knowledge of it — rather than competitive. It could be a powerful tool and we’ll watch closely to see where it goes. Although like many other things, utility for users and value for advertisers (or perception thereof) will need to be proven.

IAC-owned comparison shopping engine Pronto announced today that it will add new features that let users personalize and share information on products. This is also part of a general re-branding that positions social media as a key feature and point of differentiation within the online shopping world.

Specifically, new features will include personal profiles to save and share information, write reviews on brands or e-tailers, network with other registered users, send private messages, and filter product results by popularity among friends or geographic area.

This comes days after ShopLocal made similar integrations. ShopLocal primarily leads offline transactions, while Pronto is more of an online shopping engine. But these moves generally bring both companies into the “social shopping” realm.

Stepping Up

Social tools will be a nice addition to Pronto’s current differentiation strategy (examined here). Briefly, this model involves aggregating all possible retail feeds using a proprietary scraping technology, rather than just paid advertisers.

This, according to CEO Dan Marriott when we talked to him last year, increases the depth of content, usability and SEO friendliness of its content, which is then monetized with sponsored placements and contextual ads.

This is analogous to Google’s search model and, more important, is an attempt to differentiate the product from the current set of shopping engines, which obtain the same retail feeds and have little brand loyalty, differentiation or direct-navigation traffic. Currently Pronto has 70 million product listings from about 65,000 online retailers (about five times that of most shopping engines.)

Combined with new social features and marketing message, the company has a product strategy that stands out, in my eyes, among shopping engines. Consumer perception and adoption will ultimately decide this though.

The Cost to Play?

Social media is meanwhile becoming quite a competitive differentiator in local search and online media in general. It’s almost reached the status of “table stakes,” as more and more sites are integrating it and more and more users are coming to expect it.

But at some point, could there be “social fatigue” in cases where a user has personal profiles set up on Yelp, Facebook, MySpace, ShopLocal, and a variety of local and non-local online networks?

If so, social search could begin to approach the same fragmentation we see in local search. This is more of a forward-looking speculation, but in the meantime it is clear that social tools are an important way to remain competitive and increase stickiness, appeal and usability.

It’s important to remember, however, the distinction between online phenomena that build stand-alone destinations and those that will become standard features or value-added layers across a variety of destinations. Aside from major social networks, social media will largely fall into the latter bucket.

Moreover, it seems that an opportunity exists for Pronto to contend with this fragmentation challenge and increase the value (and local relevance) of its social tools by creating ways to sync up with personalization tools across AskCity, Citysearch, Ticketmaster and other IAC properties. I hope to talk to the company soon to examine these and other opportunities.