Search Online, Reserve, and Go to the Mall

NearbyNow helps them search anywhere in its 200 member malls. All the mall retailers are part of NearbyNow for at least basic searches — for brands of jeans, but not individual styles or products, for instance — and more than 70% offer full access to their inventories. And retailers are experimenting with a variety of text-message campaigns to see what best draws in the young crowds.NearbyNow was started two years ago after CEO-Scott Dunlap, becoming frustrated on a shopping trip with his wife, who was looking for a pair of Ferragamo boots she saw in a magazine. "I thought, 'It sure would be convenient if I could pull (inventory information) up on a mobile phone,' " he recalls. But the malls hardly have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the Web. To persuade malls to join on, NearbyNow had to promise them that it would not run any ads from retailers that only sell online. If someone searches for toys on NearbyNow, for example, he will not see an ad for eToys.com. “The big fear is ads from online retailers,” said Scott Dunlap, chief executive and president of NearbyNow. “We tell the mall: we’re only going to allow advertisements from advertisers that are inside the mall. That way we’re aligned in interests.” And NearbyNow, in return, doesn’t want any fraternizing between the malls and the search engines. In particular, it wants to promote its mobile shopping service, which lets shoppers find information about products on their mobile phones while they are in stores. Afraid that Google and Yahoo will extend their own shopping sites to mobile phones, NearbyNow made malls agree they will promote only NearbyNow within their malls as the mobile phone service to use to search for products and pricing. Yahoo and Google declined to comment on NearbyNow’s arrangement with the malls. About 1 million people are visiting NearbyNow mall sites per month now, Mr. Dunlap of NearbyNow said. About 55 percent of those customers come into a mall within 48 hours, he said, making them very attractive eyeballs for advertisers. Executives at the mall companies said they hoped NearbyNow would help them fight back against online retailing. “Instead of coming to the malls, people are shopping at home, and that’s pulling sales out of our malls,” said Lisa Moore, new business account manager at CBL Properties. “The beauty of this program is we’re trying to drive shoppers to the malls and to keep them from purchasing online.”
(Sourced from USAtoday.com, WallStreetJournal.com, Portfolio.com/mag)