Milo.com, a site where shoppers can search for products that are on the shelves of local stores has some pretty cool features.
The layout is very simple and user friendly. A good search website must emphasize on more than one way to obtain what the user is looking for. There are several ways to find products.
1. use the search box for specific items & location.
2. browse through menu tabs located just below the search boxes.
3. scroll through suggested items categorized into Family/Kids/Her/Him
If you are still unable to decide upon a gift then you could sift through the website's Product Category database/by stores/by location. For the more fashion conscious there are Popular items links too!
Moving on to the actual search results. It does a 'real-time inventory check' based on filters such as availability/Brand/Price/Local Stores/Ratings.
The slider bar for price range caught my attention immediately. I use Google Shopping most often to search for products and its refreshing to find a competitor in the local scheme of things.
Google announced it will start including local store inventories in Google Product Search. The founder and chief executive Jack Abraham noted that Milo.com has a two-year head start, with 30 retailers on-board compared to the two Google has announced, and he said, “It’s pretty complex to add each retailer.” Google also tends to get beaten when it competes on specialized searches, he said, such as when it went head-to-head against YouTube, Yelp, and Kayak.
I would give 9/10 on user interface and 9/10 on search options. I couldn't find many smaller businesses listed, whereas most big shops were present in the search filters. To sum up the site is impressive and I'm sure I would use it the next time I do an online purchase.
