Most recently eBay integrated Milo into a few of its core products, including RedLaser. So with a single scan of a product in a store, users can see which nearby retailers have a product in store, and at what price. eBay also integrated Milo’s results into its own marketplace, allowing users to include local shopping tab in search results to check a product’s local, or in-store, availability directly from the eBay search results page.
But surfacing local product results and integrating barcode scanning only scratches the surface of local and mobile commerce and its potential. There’s no doubt that eBay is reaping the benefits of mobile commerce (the company expects to do $4 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume in 2011).
Local Payments
And eBay realizes that in order to really capitalize on local and mobile in the ecommerce experience, the company also has to be a part of the point of sale for local merchants. And eBay has a player in this race—payments giant PayPal. PayPal has been making its own small forays into local commerce and late last year launched a new version of its popular iPhone app that allows users to find businesses near their immediate location that accept PayPal as a form of payment. The feature rolled out in San Francisco initially, but we haven’t heard much about the initiative since last November.
Why? Well, scaling this feature broadly to other cities is a challenge for even a large company like PayPal. Not only do they have to find the local businesses, but PayPal has to teach them how to use their mobile apps as a payment mechanism. Wouldn’t it be much easier to acquire a company that could help PayPal and eBay do this?
Monday, May 16, 2011
Connecting The Dots On eBay’s Local Shopping Strategy
via techcrunch.com
