San Francisco — eBay Inc. on Thursday announced that it has acquired local shopping search engine Milo, a website that lists real-time inventory for more than 50,000 U.S. retail stores across the nation in a move that will help the struggling e-commerce giant bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping, a market that others — including notably Google — are eyeing as well.
Milo is a local shopping search engine where consumers can look for products in stock at stores in their area. For retailers, Milo is a platform for driving online shoppers to offline stores. On its website, the Palo Alto company said its “mission is to bring every product, on every shelf, of every store in the physical world onto the Internet.” Milo currently has 140 retail partners and can deliver search results for some 3 million locally available products in about 52,000 stores across the U.S.
Terms of the deal were not revealed, but several blogs said the purchase price was $75 million.
Before piquing eBay’s local shopping interests, Milo has developed an application that can plug into a merchant’s inventory management system, enabling the start-up to instantly keep tabs on all of the retailer’s products.
“Local commerce companies like Milo are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping,” says Mark Carges, chief technology officer and senior vice president, global products, eBay Marketplaces. “By making accurate, real-time, local store inventory and pricing available to online and mobile shoppers, we see a huge opportunity for local retailers, small businesses and eBay sellers to reach more buyers, and for consumers to make more informed buying decisions.”
Carges, in an interview stated that Milo’s technology was interdependent to the ecommerce giant’s online strategy because it will enable eBay to provide shoppers with up real-time information about products that are available in local stores. “The ability to blur and blend is at the heart of this (acquisition). This actually gives (shoppers) choice,” he said.
San Jose Calif.-based eBay, which is in the midst of a multi-year endeavor to turn around its intrinsic marketplaces unit, which has experienced from dull growth and lost ground to rivals such as Amazon.com Inc.. eBay has recently taken other steps to bridge online commerce with physical retail. It is not clear however how far the integration will extend, however.
Image courtesy of Milo
Milo has managed to keep up its traffic over the last year, despite new competition from players including Google, which has added listings of products available in stock near to a user’s location to its product search. In addition, the startup raised roughly $5 million and attracted the attention of notable investors including Keith Rabois and Ron Conway’s SV Angel.
Shares in eBay recently were up 2.2% at $29.91.