Locally.com is tracking roughly 2.6 million physical products on shelves in hundreds of stores across the United States and Canada, or roughly two physical products for every individual SKU entered into its online catalog by outdoor specialty brands and their dealers.

The online startup, which empowers shoppers to browse catalogs from more than 100 outdoor brands and check local availability of their products in about 150 designated marketing areas (DMAs), told  The B.O.S.S. Repor:

  • it now provides access to more than 145,000 products from 2,567 brands;
  • 60 percent of its traffic is coming from customers conducting searches using their smartphone, tablets or other mobile devices;
  • 30 percent of its mobile search traffic is coming from Yahoo and Bing and it is working with an SEO contractor to improve its ranking on Google search pages.

“We feel pretty good about what we archived in nine months,” Locally.com Co-founder Mike Massey told The B.O.S.S. Report March 31. “We signed up 17 retail locations in the last nine days. We have more stores online locally than most other online search engines and marketplaces.”

Locally.com makes its money by providing brands and shops with a variety of a la carte services such as; geographic analytics and shopper behaviors, on-site marketing tools, and digital marketing solutions that are geographically and demographically targeted. Brand approved retailers who operate at least one physical location are invited to upload their inventory for free.

The idea is to provide consumers a single online destination where they can view a brand's entire collection, search local availability and decide how they want to proceed with their purchase – be that buying locally, ordering from an e-commerce site, or buying direct from a brand’s sites.
 
Locally.com is based in part on lessons Massey learned running the e-commerce operations for Massey's Outfitters, which operates five retail locations in Louisiana. Locally.com launched its site in June 2014 with The North Face, Black Diamond, Patagonia and other outdoor brands, who have the option of displaying a “Find it Locally” button on their pages. In recent months, Sea to Summit, Osprey, Deuter, Princeton Tec, Lowa, Arc’Teryx and Sierra Designs have all embraced the “Find it Locally” button.

While sending customers to local dealers can cost the brand's direct-to-consumer sales, dealers may have items in stock that are not available at the brand's online store or be able to meet a customer's fulfillment needs quicker and thereby prevent them from opting for a competing brand.  Some outdoor specialty brands are happy to lose online sales if it means helping authorized local specialty dealers, who they can trust to provide top-tier service and who have played a key role in helping them build their brands.