Black Friday Preparation: Pre-Search Local Stores

Black Friday is nigh, and you want to be ready. You want to maximize your time. You want Milo.com. And some comfortable shoes, but that's for another post.

Milo helps you search at home for the deals you want. And when you're mobile, it can go with you (if you have an Android phone -- iPhone comes later).

Brick-and-mortar retail is fighting back against pure-play-online types (we're looking at you, Amazon) with sites and services like these.

"We have Black Friday prices going out today, which means we'll show you if there's a special on that product at any of our retailers for Black Friday and whether or not that item is still in-stock. As of this morning, that's also out on the mobile site and will hit Android tomorrow." Milo's Lina Shustarovich told us in an email.

Slick Deals has a searchable and customizable spreadsheet that helps drill down on the best prices around, too.

Some stats: 87 percent of people research online before purchasing; 40 percent of all retail purchases will be online and online researched ... and the biggie? The look-online-buy-offline crowd will spend One Trillion Dollars next year. (Recession? Really??)

Palo Alto's Milo.com basically searches every store around. Their stated goal is "to track every product in every store in real time." They scan 52,000 stores and 3 million locally available products. 

For instance, when searching for a PS3 (what? we don't have one yet...) it displays the lowest available price as well as a map that shows locations for that retailer and all competitors, too. It even updates the results as you're searching and provides coupons, when available.

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