Infographic: Breaking Down The Local Stack
A stack of technologies has emerged to quietly reinvent the way business and consumers interact locally. One by one, technology firms have recreated the way we find, buy and retrieve goods and services locally as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers. Siloed early on, these industries are starting to coalesce, working together to form layers in a coordinated Local Stack.
Keeping Customers Coming Back Through the Power of Data
Gone are the days where the only record of a visit to a local business was a credit card transaction, loyalty punch, or cash receipt. Now our activities become user profiles that help real-world businesses to track us — as much to retain their customers as to make that customer experience better suited to the individual and less frustrating…
Powering the Payment Stream
For years, local search has fed consumers to a technological black hole. The systems on which local businesses rely to manage day-to-day operations have remained offline, relegated to legacy tools or silo-ed in digital products not built for the web. But that’s changing. Thanks to a number of new companies that are reimagining the way consumers shop and reprovisioning the systems that business owners use to monitor and transact the exchange of goods locally, that “source code” is coming online, filling a critical gap in the local commerce stack…
Winning in Local Commerce Means Solving the Data Issues in Discovery
The acceleration in the local consumer’s purchase cycle means that each layer of the the Local Stack of online-to-offline local commerce — find, buy, retrieve and engage — must fuse together and work to create a seamless local commerce experience. In the “find” layer, local search properties have expanded beyond point-of-interest data, investing in the rich content needed to help consumers make purchase decisions before leaving businesses’ sites…
Why Local is the Future of Commerce
The past decade has seen a slow but persistent transformation in the set of services consumers use to navigate the local marketplace. One by one, technology firms have recreated or reinvented various layers of the local shopping experience, disrupting industries and opening doors for new ones to emerge. The transformation began in search, but companies have since started to rethink the way we buy and retrieve these goods and services as well as the way businesses reward, and retain, past customers, creating a coordinated “stack,” to borrow a term from computing.