Anti-Amazon Artillery: Pointy Announces New Ways To Turn Search Into Store Visits

Anti-Amazon Artillery: Pointy Announces New Ways To Turn Search Into Store Visits

When retail tech startup Pointy announced its plan to create a business based on helping local retailers boost their search results and draw more customers to their stores, it was met with some skepticism in Silicon Valley.

“There were those who asked is this investing in buggy whips when the car is coming,” is how Pointy co-founder Mark Cummins described the initial reaction.

“There are a lot of people who believe Amazon will kill local retail and everything will come in a drone and we will just sit at home and order on our smartphones. I don’t share that vision of the future,” he said.

Now, three years after its U.S. launch, Pointy is proving the skeptics wrong. Today it announced new partnerships with three retail point-of-sale software providers, and said it has enjoyed rapid growth in the United States, reaching its 2019 goal of 10,000 stores, or 1 percent of U.S. retailers, using Pointy.

The Dublin-based company announced that point-of-sale providers Vend, Quickbooks Cloud and IdoSoft are now integrated with Pointy, joining Clover, Square, and Lightspeed, which began integrating with Pointy last year. The new integrations will drive growth and spread Pointy to more U.S. retailers, Cummins said.

Pointy sells retailers a way to have their inventory visible in Google searches, on Google Maps, and Google’s See What’s In Store pages, to customers nearby who are searching for those items. It is designed to drive customers into stores, not to drive online sales …[Read More]