Retail inventory has been revving up as a new, highly mobile-oriented tool for retailers to highlight stock on hand and steer consumers to store locations. It is an important lead-generating feature on new shopping portals, such as FindnSave. Research by JiWire shows that 62 percent of consumers seek product availability when researching goods online. The company also notes that “low consideration goods found in local shopping centers” are core to inventory promotion.

Key entrants in the space include JiWire, via its acquisition of NearByNow; eBay, via its $75 million acquisition of Milo.com last year; ShopSavvy; and now Google, which is diving in via Google Product Search, a spin-off of Google Base, the now defunct classifieds aggregation product.

Vancouver-based Wishpond, an angel-funded company, is another entrant. Wishpond has largely positioned itself as a platform, equally focusing on inventory from both local and national retailers. The others have focused more explicitly on national retailers.

The company has signed up 1,700 retailers in the U.S. and Canada and seeks to differentiate itself by enabling merchants to upload their product inventory in a variety of ways. In addition to providing retailers with free self-serve management tools, merchants can import their inventory via Web crawling, shopping cart plug-ins, batch upload, through their Point of Sales system and other methods. Wishpond also goes beyond inventory by adding real-time price checks, stock availability checking and merchant meta data. It offers these data to publishers and mobile app developers through an open API.

We don’t comment here on how unique these solutions are. All the contenders in the space claim to be unique. But the combination of broader reach and inventory upload options have helped Wishpond build an inventory of 6 million products, or twice as many as reported by Milo.com, which has some local stores but is more focused on a number of large, core accounts.

“The consumer starts their search for a product or item, not a retailer,” says Wishpond founder and CEO Ali Tajsekandar. “We help retailers get their products seen by local consumers wherever they are searching online — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Mobile and more.” By working with Wishpond, retailers will see their product inventory distributed to search engines and other sites where consumers are most likely to search for it, including Google Product Search, Facebook, Twitter and various mobile apps.

Wishpond also helps companies manage their online promotions on various ad channels and social networks. “We can help a merchant set up a Facebook “store” in a few clicks,” he notes. “Once connected, the fans can browse promotional products or search full inventory and find location details on the nearest branch that carries a given product.”

While monetizing has not been a core focus as it ramps up, Tajsekandar notes that Wishpond has a program for upselling stores to various SEM packages for merchants that want to give their inventory and promotions greater visibility.

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The ability to track retail inventory has been on the retail wish list for years. Retailers advertise goods, and then disappoint customers when they don’t have them in stock. Or they have loads of stock in the store, and don’t know they need to promote it to deplete it. Or they have a lot of inventory in one location, but can’t steer customers to the right store.

Solutions have been in the works for some time, for various functions and purposes. Some have been telecom-oriented. McDonald’s, for instance, started keeping track of Big Macs and Double Cheeseburgers in 1990 via ISDN. Most, however, have been relatively primitive phone-in efforts.

In 2006, for instance, StepUp, which is now part of Intuit’s Homestead, showed the way for online inventory management by letting stores fill out inventory on a spreadsheet. A sophisticated, contemporary effort has been mounted by Krillion, which provides inventory for computers, electronics, cameras, appliances and other goods, while selling advertising around it.

More recently, we’ve also seen Milo.com develop an inventory solution for both national and local players. Wishpond is pursuing a similar strategy. The timing for both companies appears to be ripe. Milo.com was purchased two weeks ago by eBay for $75 million.

Milo has integrated with various media partners, such as The Sacramento Bee. Today, Wishpond announced a partnership to do the same with PaperG, which builds display ads on the fly for a large list of newspapers. In this case, PaperG will be able to spec out a display ad based on inventory availability (i.e., “denim hats at Davey’s Army Navy store”). Customers of its PlaceLocal service can utilize the service.

PaperG CEO Victor Wong tells us that Wishpond’s solution lets PaperG and its media partners get down to the product level for both national chains and for local stores. Roughly a quarter of its advertisers are local SMBs, he notes. Using Wishpond, “toys are ads,” he says.

“The next natural evolution to local display advertising is to show what stores and products are available within driving distance of the consumer,” Wong added, in a statement. “Ad units that allow consumers to find information on local product availability can dramatically improve the offline conversion rates of shoppers.”

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