The absolute only idea that I had which might work is to provide businesses with 100% free automatic (rfid or whatever based) inventory systems of whatever size they need. Yes, that is a large expense.
However, in exchange for the free inventory system, you get access to their data and the ability to post it online. You give people the ability (but don't force them to) buy the item from their mobile phone/computer quickly and easily, so when they show up they have a zero balance and are ready to go. Then you take a 2-5% cut of that (just a hair more than credit card transactions) for the online business referral.
TL;DR- Give business owners something expensive and massively valuable in return for their data, and the ability to let consumers buy their items through your referral system online.
I agree. Putting your entire stock online can take a lot of manpower, depending on who you are. (Best Buy? Probably fairly trivial. Grandma's and Grandpa's Little Shop of Flowers? Gotta hire more grandkids.)
Unless the time and money spent on the effort is going to pay off, and pay off quick, a store isn't going to bother.
Why just not parse/index all the products from stores websites and verify in-stock real-time when making a search via script or something (given that in-stock availability is indicated). Using this approach you can collect product/location data from more than a million stores I would guess. No?
Real-time inventory tracking for as large a company as Best Buy is "fairly trivial"?
For large companies, it is a multi-million dollar investment to build a warehouse management system capable of showing near real-time levels of inventory. Besides the capital costs, companies can have very specific workflows for managing inventory levels. Also things like drop-ship vendors and sourcing items from multiple sources can make it extremely difficult to calculate or predict inventory levels prior to a sale.
No, the main challenge is calling every mom & pop store and getting them indexed. You are also unlikely to convince a mom & pop store to do any extra work, especially if it involves something they don't understand (computers).
There's a reason Milo is starting with big-box and national retailers.
I thought you were saying that business owners would be reluctant to share their data,e.g., for privacy or competitive reasons, versus:
1. The difficulty and expense associated with calling and converting smaller retailers
2. The amount of effort required by smaller retailers to integrate with your system coupled with the fact that smaller retailers are technologically lazy and don't readily understand the benefits of integrating
The "easiest" way might be to replace their inventory systems yourself, for example. This is more-or-less what OpenTable did.
No, I meant for all of those reasons, not any one. I'm sure there would be a wide variety of reasons a business wouldn't want to publish data. You're right to draw them out into separate worries.
The company I work for is trying to come up with a solution of it's own...
We're working on tagging our products with RFID. That way, we can show the inventory of the products online for consumers to see. Not only that, we can help our retail partners keep our product in stock.
It's at no cost to the retailer and relatively simple.
Walmart has been trying to get a similar system implemented for years (they're currently testing their latest iteration on denim - all denim is tagged supposedly).
We do not sell to Walmart, we're in a very different channel.
A partial solution would be to have something like Google street view for the insides of stores. At least then you could check to see if the store had what you wanted. Some objects could probably be automatically recognized.
