More on Milo and Mobile Shopping

On Friday, Peter posted about a conversation we had earlier in the week with Milo founder and current head of local at eBay Jack Abraham. To divide and conquer, I wrote up separate thoughts on the mobile angle, as Part II of my mobile shopping column at Street Fight.

A teaser is below and you can click through for the entire thing. Part I can be found here.

Following my column last month, where I took a look at mobile local shopping data (and the dreaded “showrooming” effect), I had the chance to catch up with eBay’s head of local, and Milo founder, Jack Abraham to talk a bit about where the space is headed.

As explored in the last column, shoppers are utilizing on-hand devices to bring transparency to the retail showroom floor. And smart companies like Amazon not only provide apps to get product details (via barcode scan), but even offer e-commerce deals for items scanned in-store.

That’s a daunting prospect for retailers — as their customers are getting poached right out from under them. You’d think that might be their cue to adopt mobile tools to keep users engaged and in-store.

Abraham claims that retailer adoption has increased for its inventory data over the past two years, but there’s still lots of room to grow. For those unfamiliar, Milo works with retailers and publishers to provide a valuable layer of searchable product inventory data on any app.

Retailers, overall, are showing laggard adoption, considering the situation they’re in and the availability of tools like Milo, apps like Shopkick; and competitive pressure from the Amazons of the world. They need to fight fire with fire, but still many aren’t.

The latest example: a December survey from AisleBuyer revealed that 55 percent of retailers have a mobile app with m-commerce functionality. Many offer store locators (87 percent) or product search (74 percent). But real-time inventory or transactional features…not as much.

Read the rest.