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Pointy helps customers find what they need close to home

The technology helps local businesses compete with big e-commerce retailers.

Robin Kurzer on December 5, 2017 at 3:08 pm

Yes, you have the inventory, but since large e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Walmart seem to dominate search results, local customers don’t know it. Now, Pointy can make sure they do.

Available to businesses of any size, Pointy’s programmatic technology provides stores with an automatic way to list all of their products online. Their “Pointy box” device connects to a barcode scanner that picks up the SKUs and automatically creates an up-to-date, SEO-optimized page, allowing customers who use a search engine to see results that show what’s available in real time.

Mark Cummins, CEO and founder of Pointy, told me that the device not only helps companies to geotarget potential customers with real inventory; it also provides a benefit to the customers who can get what they need from a local vendor instead of waiting for it to be delivered.

Cummins said that if a customer were looking for a particular product — his examples were face glitter and a pogo stick — Pointy would help the product show up in both organic and paid search through an integration with Google.

“We’re trying to level the playing field,” he said. “If a customer has local intent, there’s no reason why they should order from Amazon.”

Cummins also said that Pointy solves a headache for CMOs: legacy IT systems.

“A lot of the pain points for CMOs are legacy IT systems,” he said, explaining that many large companies have IT systems that are fragmented by acquisitions or have assets that are unavailable to franchises or cooperatives.

“We free the marketing department from being constrained by IT fragmentation,” Cummins said.

About The Author

Robin Kurzer

Robin Kurzer started her career as a daily newspaper reporter in Milford, Connecticut. She then made her mark on the advertising and marketing world in Chicago at agencies such as Tribal DDB and Razorfish, creating award-winning work for many major brands. For the past seven years, she’s worked as a freelance writer and communications professional across a variety of business sectors.