Retail to Web Inventory

MediaPost reported some interesting comments from Karen Crow, director of sales and operations for Google: "We’ve been doing a lot of linking with advertisers’ back end to find out, for example, what specific products their local store has, and which of those products are in stock. We’re trying to figure out how to work with local advertisers to link inventory so people can know that yes, that particular SKU is in stock."

This live inventory push is something we have spent considerable time writing about. Based on our previous reports, we can assume that this back-end matching is in part done by Google partner StepUp Commerce, which maintains nearly 10,000 retail relationships. StepUp declined comment at this time.