More on shopping malls….
NearbyNow is a search engine specifically for your local shopping mall — and we hear it’s getting strong interest from venture capitalists.
It’s about to finish raising another $5 million. The company raised $2.5 million last year, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and including Draper Richards.
On its face, this may seem like just another wannabe search engine. However, there’s increasing realization that many people like to search online to do price comparisons, but prefer to shop offline so they can touch and feel a product — especially for higher-priced items. We recently wrote about Krillion, which lets you search local stores for consumer appliances. Both sites are getting inventory information straight from the local retailers, and so their info is much richer than others sites, such as ShopLocal.
NearbyNow lets people search online through the entire inventory of their local shopping malls. So shoppers at home can see what is new, and what is on sale. They can search by category, but also search for things like coupons, or by stores. A site is created for each shopping mall (see screenshot below). Moreover, the company is offering search stations within the malls. Like in the Reactrix case, we’ve heard the company has signed deals with several top mall owners. (Our source is outside of the company).
Several Silicon Valley malls are among those already live.
Here’s more information on the type of information the site provides to customers, retailers and advertisers. Nothing can be bought online; it is about pushing people into the stores.
11 Comments
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Clarum said:
this wont work until mall operators shoove it down retailers throats (and given that retailers already hate their mall operators, thats a problme); even so most retailers systems cant support it. every year, some vc get sucked into this idea. next.
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Matt Marshall said:
thinking about this more, another problem is the sheer amount of noise out there — how do i really generate loyalty to such a site. if I’m really looking for something, i fall back to check google for store info, then call up store and ask if they’ve got something. and if i’m looking for sales, well i’m overwhelmed by info every day.
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Anson said:
I think the major problem is how they keep update their record. We all know that retailers can change their items’price everyday and if the item is out of store, how?
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Paul Sweeney said:
Maybe there is a model that doesn’t require their co-operation. The Wi-fi model initially sought to sell the location connectivity, and it was just downright thrown out by the customer where they had new options. The same could happen here. The mall owners and stores are maybe not the people that need to lead the model.
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rk said:
This will not work, as Matt mentioned above too much noise, also sort of fragmented approach. Imagine if one is going to valley fair mall to buy some item X, than that person would prefer a LCD panel with this site on it. Than these guy’s business model will be sort of each mall’s search engine for item, Also this kind of works against premise of the mall culture, where vendors are hoping one gets distracted by there display and buys on impulse! vs. be focused towards there targeted item.
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Paul Sweeney said:
Must say, I like the LCD Panel approach outlined by RK above. And a completely valid questioning of the context, social and cultural as well as economic, in which the “location based search request” might be made. Perhaps messages, and images, can be used to motivate a change in foot fall flows? Perhaps the system might be used to actually market the Mall as a destination, as opposed to in-mall competition?
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Sundar Krishnamurthy said:
Interestingly, NearbyNow’s tagline of turning online browsers into in-store buyers is exactly the same as StepUp’s.
With very little differentiation among these offerings, it is easy to get lost among the different players as Matt Marshall points out.
Also, these startups must compete for attention against the retail vendors themselves who offer online ordering and in-store pickup.
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Theo Tonca said:
Only time will tell if it will work or not. Best of luck to the NearByNow guys though. I’m currently working on integrating online/offline shopping, but it won’t be anything like this.
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C said:
total airball. majority of tenants in a Mall already have websites that they manage on their own. That is what most shoppers are finding when they google it anyway. Add in the logistics nightmare (like several posters have noted) of tracking and updating inventory and I see the overall customer experience w/ this website to me less than fulfilling.
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Mickey Mixon said:
NearbyNow lets people search online through the entire inventory of their local shopping malls. So shoppers at home can see what is new, and what is on sale. They can search by category, but also search for things like coupons, or by stores.This is very interesting article click on the linkOnline shopping Mall to find similar article:
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Daniel said:
Although NearbyNow has this service where people can search online through their entire inventory of their local shopping malls. People in the future are going to get sick of finding parking spots, dealing with traffic. I think the way of the future is online shopping. Less hassle and saves time. If the Item is not right it can always be returned for a refund or exchanged. Shoppers can easily see what’s new in an instant without having to brave the elements. It can be delivered to thier door. Even supermarket shopping is heading for this trend. Every way I turn the same trend is Surfacing. People want an Mall of the World.
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6:54 pm
The playing field is still open for mall search engines like NearbyNow » VentureBeat said:
[...] good way to look through the sorts of styles different stores carry. As readers pointed out in our first story about NearbyNow, the company’s challenge isn’t in developing a useful product, but in [...]