SmallBusinessNewz

It's always nice when you can figure out a way to infiltrate your competitors' operations and actually use them to sell your own product. Look at how Hulu has become one of the top ten channels on YouTube for example.

Google recently added a couple of mobile features that small businesses (particularly online businesses should pay attention to). First, they released Product Search for mobile. What this means, is that users can be shopping anywhere in the physical world and come across something they like and easily turn to their mobile phone to do a quick price comparison search, where they might find a better deal online. That deal could come from you.

Just last week, they introduced barcode scanning for Android devices, which allows users to actually scan items and find them quickly with Google Product Search, just making the process that much easier on the consumer. If you sell products, make sure they're listed.

"In order for your product offer to be listed when a user searches using their barcode scanner, you need to include a unique product identifier attribute like a Universal Product Code (UPC) or European Article Number (EAN) in your data feed," notes Vivek Tata on the Google Base blog.

Google explains unique product identifiers at this help center:

Unique product identifiers are product codes associated with an individual product. Also known as Global Trade Identification Numbers (GTINs), unique product identifiers include UPC, EAN (in Europe), and ISBN. These identifiers are very important for making sure that users are able to find your products. We strongly encourage that you include identifiers for every product that has one.

So just think, if you sell mp3 players for example, you may have a potential customer who is standing in line at Best Buy or WalMart. Perhaps they are waiting forever, get bored, and decide to pull out their phone and scan the device just to see what comes up.

"Wait a minute...you're selling it for ten dollars cheaper with free shipping. Looks like I'm going to be in this line for the same amount of time it would take me to receive it via mail."

More likely, the scanning will happen before they even get in line with the product. It may be a little early (in terms of this catching on at the mainstream level), but there are a lot of sales opportunities here, and I would not be surprised if this kind of thing becomes much more common a little further down the road.