Here at Krillion we're planning our product roadmap for 2010 — many great things in store for our partners and customers across consumer-goods manufacturers and retailers, web publishers, and marketers. As we set off on the road into the new year (and decade), it's informative to look back over our shoulder at the progress made in 2009. Here are some of the 2009 highlights.
Launch of our next-generation product locator
In 2009, we hit a major development milestone with the launch of the Krillion 360 Product Locator. Our goal with this release was to expand the functionality of the first version of our web-to-store product locator by aggregating more product information and multi-channel services, including those from both offline and online retailers.
This represents a big shift for many consumer-goods manufacturers, who would otherwise have been forced to either 'make do' with spotty retailer and product coverage to power their 'where to buy' pages, or completely abandon the idea of offering their web shoppers accurate location, pricing and availability information at the product level in one spot.
The Krillion 360 Product Locator does it all: offline and online retailers, real-time price and availability — all in one easy-to-integrate package.
Toshiba's notebook division was the first to deploy the new product locator, and it's been delivering excellent results, driving higher traffic to where to buy pages and double digit conversions to local retailer checkout pages.
Taking the newspaper circular onto the web
Early in 2009 we announced a partnership with Topix, the Web's leading news community, to integrate a 'hyper-local' (down to the ZIP code) version of ‘weekly deals’ product locator in a rich media widget, optimized for the needs of online news publishers. Based on our early success with this new e-circular format, which highlights deals on fast-moving products at local retailers, we developed a more interactive version for Topix. This new version, now live on their site, is an enticing look at the potential that e-circulars can offer news publishers, who are transforming their business model from print to online and mobile.
The new Krillion e-circular can be tuned to allocate priority to both brands and retailers, with the possibility of using location-based services that will be commonplace with the increasing popularity of 'super phones', e-readers and tablets.
Krillion powers in-store kiosks for price match guarantee
Sears has been consistently leading the way in cross-channel systems that make it easier for their online shoppers to 'shop their way'. What about the in-store shopper? How to improve their experience and close the deal on a product? An interesting development from our earlier work with Sears was their decision to leverage our ability to compare prices and availability across local retailers as the basis for their in-store price-checker.
It's a simple concept: match the price of a nearby store. Retailers have been doing this for years, often requiring the customer to bring in a hardcopy of a circular. Sears wanted to go beyond that - providing in-store shoppers with instant price checks of a particular item across competing stores, and selected our local product search technology to power in-store kiosks.
The road ahead
Looking into 2010, we have a lot in store. Here are just a few of the ideas we're working on:
- expansion of our index to take it broader (more categories) and deeper (more products)
- inclusion of more retail partners
- a new "smart suggest" feature that intelligently substitutes similar products if a particular product is out of stock
- delivery estimates for warehouse-to-home shipments
We look forward to helping you connect shoppers with local, in-stock merchandise.
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