Google enables retail stock checking

Sunday 14 March 2010 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Tags: Ecommerce, Google, Local, Mobile, Search, Shopping

Back in 2006 Google, along with Intuit and the Kelsey Group, described the future of retailing and the picture included the ability to check the stock levels of nearby stores as you shop. It may have taken a few years, but now it's a reality - in the US, at least. The search giant announced this week that it is rolling out its Product Search for mobile with local inventory.

In their post on the Google Mobile and Merchant blog on Thursday, Product Managers Paul Lee and Yury Pinsky urged mobile device users to look out for blue dots in their results:

"We're happy to announce that as of today, if you're searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it's available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent 'In stock nearby' link, and you'll be taken to the seller's page where you'll see whether the item is 'In Stock' or has 'Limited Availability' near you. You'll also see how far away the stores are from you - as long as you've enabled My Location or manually specified your location."

Google real-time local inventory search

Google Local Shopping Results

The post ended with a call to retailers to sign up to the scheme. Google is likely to be inundated with requests and may have to dedicate significant resources to its commitment to being an inventory gatekeeper.

The stock check service works on the iPhone, Palm WebOS phone or any Android-powered device in the US. Users simply need to go to Google.com in their mobile browser, tap on the 'more' link, and then select 'shopping', or look for the 'shopping results' section in universal search results when they search on Google.com.

Gosh! Media is confident that high street retailers worldwide will be pleased that, after years of losing business to on-line rivals, the Internet is at last doing something positive for them.

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