Goodzer, which offers local store inventory by crawling websites and matching store locations, has gone national and launched an iPhone app. The company says that it has indexed “billions of products from half a million local stores,” including independent “mom and pop” retailers. It also claims that it has “nearly one thousand times more products than its closest competitor.”
That begs the question: Who is Goodzer’s “closest competitor”? I suspect eBay-owned Milo is the target here. However Google, JiWire (which bought NearbyNow), Retailigence and Local.com (which bought Krillion) are also prominent local inventory providers.
The data being displayed are not guaranteed in-store inventory. However Goodzer lets you know which retailers carry the desired item locally. The just-launched iPhone app offers both e-commerce functionality and local store information. The UI and user experience in the app and online are both quite good.
The app also features a clever “ask friends” element, which will send the image and price information of the item via email, Twitter or Facebook to a person’s network or selected people. This is one way that people already shop with mobile devices today: they take pictures of items in stores and send them to friends for input.
In addition to the above-mentioned competitors to Goodzer individual retailers offer real-time inventory data about their own stores.
November 25th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
[...] also features a barcode scanner that accesses price and product reviews content. Goodzer is another site and mobile app that tells you what stores carry products locally. It doesn’t guarantee real-time inventory [...]
December 6th, 2011 at 8:22 pm
[...] Und wer noch einen Schritt weiter gehen will öffnet sein Angebot für die Suche. Dann können Produktsuchmaschinen, wie Goodzer dem Suchenden gleich sagen, ob das gewünschte Produkt auch vorhanden ist und ggf sogar zu welchem [...]