A closer look at Milo.com
Well I was a little saddened to see that NearbyNow, a company that I had looked at in some detail last spring seems to have ceased operations of their web shopping portal, and now like many others seem to be going the route of providing a platform for others, mostly magazines, to develop their own retail shopping iPhone applications. Be sure to check out the Practical E -commerce Q&A for a quick run down of what happened with Nearby Now.
But don’t fear, where one company is exiting, there is always another entering. And the latest hot entrant in the area of local product search seems to be a company called milo.com. The company just announced that it had raised $4 million in a substantially over subscribed round which included some big name VC firms and private investors.
So what is all the fuss about? Well, in case you weren’t aware e-commerce was so late 90’s… after years and years of hype e-commerce still only represents a tiny percent of total retail commerce (5%), and you guessed it people are still frequently walking around on sidewalks and into stores and handing a sales clerk their credit cards and cash and walking out the door with a product resting happily in the bottom of a bag.
So the relatively new found focus seems to have shifted to how people pick the stores they visit and the products they purchase… and as you might expect looking around for information on the web is a big part of that decision making process.
Research on the web, but buy offline in a nearby store.
So there have been a number of site that have popped up over the years to attempt this: Yokel, Slifter, NearbyNow, ShopLocal, Krillion and even Google’s own Froogle. But none seem to have shown much success. But with the market for ‘research online, buy offline’ estimated to reach $1 trillion by 2011 its not surprising that folks will just keep on trying to crack the code.
So why would anyone think that maybe Milo will succeed where the others have failed? Well I’ll take a stab at it… looking around at some of the competitive offering there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the real time inventory availability aspect… many sites have that and in fact in some categories like sporting goods, the list of participating retailers is stronger with competitors. And doing an identical litmus tests across sites with a search for a Playstation 3 in Manhattan’s zip code 10024, Milo gave me the equally crappy result that I should swim across the Hudson river to find this easy to find item in Paterson New Jersey, even though its available about 50 yards from my apartment across the street at the GameStop I can see out of my living room window. Evidently they don’t have a deal with GameStop yet.
However, Milo seems to have gone more broad (and long tail) than the others with retailers like Target, Walgreens and Barnes and Noble, the latter of which alone may have as many as 100k book titles in stock at any given store… Milo claims to have nearly 1.5 million products available, and knowing how many SKUs are carried by folks like WalMart and Barnes and Noble, I don’t doubt it.
I think the unique part of the Milo approach is on the inbound marketing side, acquiring customers… in other words SEO, SEO and more SEO. When people research items on the web, where do you think they go? Well to Google of course. So rather than fighting this by trying to create a competitive search destination site/tool that you’d only use when search for products locally, Milo takes the logical step which is to try like heck to be sure that their product pages come up high in the search results from product searches that include a local intent (like Garmin 10019). Very similar to what Local.com is trying to do with local business listings, although as far as I can tell without the SEM arbitrage part.
In fact a search for site:milo.com on Google reveals that there are a whopping 319,000 pages on the site in their index! Just for some perspective the Wall Street Journal online has 204k pages, and CNN.com 415k. Now a similar search for NearbyNow reveals that they have close to ½ million pages… but a quick glance reveals a major difference… NearbyNow pages are generally a lot of the same templates with just new location (like Orlando, Fl) swapped in for each page. Milo pages are unique, text and keyword heavy product specific pages… and there are over 300k of them! So if all those pages are product pages then that’s 20% of their available product inventory having its own dedicated web page… and if you believe the good old 80/20 rule applies here, presumably those 20% are the items responsible for 80% of the searches.
After doing a number of Google searches with product names and zip codes, I was pretty impressed with how frequently a Milo product pages came up in the listings.
- A product search with local intent: you often get milo listings (Search: Garmin 10024)
- A product search without local intent: no sign of milo listings (Search: Garmin)
So the company has obviously figured out a way to do local product SEO quite well… with all those unique product pages a clear differentiator… and perhaps some behind the scenes link juice with major e-tailers. The company seems to do a fair amount of web crawling, likely of their retail partner sites, which may also help them to systematize the process of quickly adding new products to their index by grabbing marketing elements that live outside of the inventory system.
Certainly an interesting company to keep an eye on, and in particular to see how they develop the revenue side of the business, now that they seem to have the marketing side well on its way.
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