The Praized Blog

“Krillion is a search engine that lets you find consumer appliances in stores near you. (…) Krillion lists the specific makes of fridges and other appliances carried at the stores near you, and that are in stock, thus giving you more direct help in your quest to find them. Eventually, Krillion wants to expand coverage to other categories, including consumer electronics, lawn and garden and seasonal appliances.”

“Interestingly, Krillion does not consider itself primarily a consumer destination. It strives to offer a highly usable consumer experience but Toledano (Krillion’s CEO) sees it largely as an advertising solution. (…) it solves “the last mile” problem for regional/national advertisers and manufacturers by directing consumers to where they can buy products in over 40,000 local markets. Accordingly, the business model is retailer and manufacturer advertising. (Krillion) aim to push out the content in SEO and through partner relationships to gain maximum distribution rather than relying heavily on building a consumer brand or destination. ”

(via VentureBeat and Search Engine Land)

What it means: This new company seems strangely similar to Stepup.com (who was recently acquired by Intuit). StepUp’s connection with Intuit is already a strong barrier to entry for new Local Shopping competition and the market is already pretty crowded (In addition to StepUp, Search Engine Land lists ShopLocal, NearbyNow, Yokel, CNET, Froogle, Become.com and data provider Channel Intelligence). Most experts (including me) agree that local inventory is the next Holy Grail in local search but it’s going to be a tough nut to crack.