New local shopping search engine launchedPosted 11/08/2004
StepUp.com has unveiled a beta testing version of its local shopping engine.
The new site - StepUp.com - enables web shoppers to find popular retail products near their current location and is currently offering merchants a limited free period to list their products online.
The company claims that, "StepUp.com combines the benefits of online shopping with local commerce, providing consumers and local merchants a powerful new tool."
"We founded StepUp.com because local shopping is broken, and our mission is to fix it. Currently, half of the 80 million web shoppers in the US prefer to purchase offline, but the Yellow Pages, the most-used local shopping resource, only list generic categories and force customers to call around in order to find specific products. This makes local shopping tedious at best," said Kendall Fargo, president and CEO of StepUp.com.
"At the same time, businesses have been frustrated trying to promote their local store inventory to the growing number of online shoppers. For those merchants, we developed simple patent-pending internet sales tools, making it easy for them to drive new 'walk-in' business from local customers who use the web."
California-based StepUp.com's sales tools include a client that automatically uploads inventory information continually from QuickBooks, the leading financial management product from Intuit Inc. Businesses can easily register as member stores and will be able to begin merchandising their products immediately.
Shoppers visiting StepUp.com will be able to use local search for a product and will have the option of buying from a physical store in their vicinity or, if it is not available locally, the shopper will be able to buy the product from a web store. © DeHavilland Information Services plc
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