Are We There Yet?

Chances are most consumers who frequent the Internet know MapQuest.com. Mapping and driving directions are one of the most popular resources on the web. MapQuest’s Business Solutions, the unit that provides that mapping functionality to third parties, is less generally known—that is, unless you’re a retailer: MapQuest is the provider for about 6 out of every 10 retailers that make maps available to consumers on their sites.

That makes MapQuest currently the largest provider of maps and road directions to retailers and other third parties, at a time when consumers are coming to expect them as an extension of store locator features attached to the web sites of larger multi-channel retailers and others.

Shifting landscape

MapQuest, owned by AOL, is the longest-established mapping services provider online and in little imminent danger of losing its first-mover advantage. But the landscape is shifting. Online maps’ appeal to consumers, and their ability when posted on a retail site to help lock in online shoppers for the last mile of web-to-store purchases, have attracted the attention of other providers willing to supply sites with maps and road directions on a third-party basis.

And there’s a twist: MapQuest has built a business model on selling such services, with b2b pricing for its licensed products starting at an annual $5,000, and going higher depending on usage and the particular feature set involved. But since last year, both Google and Yahoo have offered an application programming interface that allows web developers—and the retailers and other businesses they work for—to access a degree of mapping functionality and put it on their site for free.

What do the portals get out of offering at no charge some of the mapping capacity that has been provided at a fee? Brand exposure, for one thing. “One of the things we get is name recognition by making sure folks have access to our maps, whether they are on a Yahoo site, a retailer’s site, a blog or wherever,” says Vince Maniago, product manager for Yahoo Local and Maps.

It also helps position the portals for potential local advertising opportunities in the future. “It means they will have a larger share of the Internet mapping business,” says Matt Booth, vice president and program director of interactive local media at local search and advertising consultants The Kelsey Group. “Over time, many people believe, the larger the control you have over mapping services, the more advertising and the more integrated services you will be able to run on maps.”

Maps and inventory

For example, in a recent earnings call, Google discussed its hopes to integrate live inventory data feeds directly into its online maps in the future, allowing consumers to mouse over a map see what’s in stock in a local store without having to leave the house or call to find out. “Over time, it makes sense to have live inventory feeds go directly to a map. Then you can run interstitial advertising over them as well,” says Booth.

The free APIs currently don’t offer the same degree of customization to the business user that the licensed products from MapQuest do, but “free” can be a powerful incentive, particularly for smaller retailers that might not otherwise have access to maps. And in fact, MapQuest covered its bases by adding a free API to its lineup of mapping products a few months ago. That free API expands the b2b options at MapQuest from a web services product all the way to an entire licensed mapping platform the retailer can run behind its own firewall.

The marketplace will determine the relative merits of the free APIs for the business owners that use them and the portals that offer them. And increasingly, advanced functionality tied to mapping services on the site will become a means of retail site differentiation. But in the meantime, rising competition among mapping service providers is sending a clear message to retailers: It’s not enough to tell customers where you are, you also have to tell them exactly how to get there.

“The value of location awareness in retail goes well beyond the simple and what we now think of as ubiquitous store locator, ” says Christian Dwyer, MapQuest’s director of operations. “Look at where retailers are going—they are offering the ability to research online, purchase in the store, buy it online and do store pickup and return. Location awareness is becoming a key enabler for an effective multi-channel strategy.”

Staying on-site

MapQuest.com is just one of the online destinations that afford consumers the ability to enter an address and find maps and driving directions. But going to MapQuest.com or Google or Yahoo maps takes customers off the retailer’s site and requires them to take the extra steps of entering those coordinates to get the information.

That puts more distance between the customer and the purchase. It may even take shoppers past competitors’ advertising, depending on how they search for store maps on those portals. From a strategic perspective, requiring shoppers to hop off their site in pursuit of a purchase goes counter to online retailers’ desire to exercise as much control over their customers’ experience as possible.

Yahoo is one such portal, and while traffic and eyeballs are currency to a portal, Yahoo recognizes merchants’ desire for control. “We have not done any merchant research to explore that value, but certainly, that is one of the reasons we offer the syndication of the API that lets you put our maps on your site, so that you can control that experience completely,” says Maniago.

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Similarly, while MapQuest, also a destination in its own right, says it hasn’t quantified the value to retailers of putting maps and directions directly on retail sites, “Certainly having a customer go to a web site and stay there without having to link off of it is of tremendous value, especially when you think of that multi-channel retail strategy,” says MapQuest’s Dwyer. “You don’t want people coming to your web site, getting a list of stores and then having to cut and paste that address into a web site like MapQuest.com to get the directions and go to that store. You want to be full service and retain that customer within the retailing experience you are creating on your web site.”

A huge amount of technology underlies the creation of online maps and particularly, of driving directions. Outdated data is online map users’ top criticism, and one of the top challenges facing online map and road directions service providers.

The right address

The first layer of difficulty in creating online maps is getting the store address right. Mapping service providers don’t always get business addresses directly from the businesses involved, according to Booth. Those store addresses are more typically provided by database companies such as Info USA that specialize in compiling and continually updating data, including physical addresses, on U.S. households and businesses. “Anytime you see an online map, it’s created by geocoding the address, which has come from somebody like Info USA, and putting a latitude and longitude on the physical address,” says Booth.

Keeping map displays current isn’t the only issue. The ever-changing status of streets and roads also presents a challenge in keeping driving directions current. To accomplish that, online mapping service providers such as MapQuest and Yahoo contract with road network data providers such as TeleAtlas and Navteq. These providers have crews out actually driving the mapped roads continuously, collecting and coding attributes on each road.

Online mapping services that provide a map display and driving directions use that updated data as the basis of what they show consumers. At MapQuest, for example, the data are processed against business rules or algorithms to create driving direction logic from point A to point B that factors in considerations such as, how many stoplights or left turns or how much expressway driving is on a given route. “That is all done on the fly to calculate driving directions,” says Dwyer.

So while a free mapping API might be simple enough to attach to a retail site, the technology supporting it is complex. In fact, that’s why Yahoo’s free API, which provides an interface that lets a retail site’s users call up maps from Yahoo while remaining on the retailer’s site, actually links users directly to Yahoo.com if they want driving directions. “All of that data requires a lot of care and feeding and for the moment, we don’t have a way to syndicate that out to a merchant’s site. But we do have an easy way to link, so if a merchant wants to provide links to driving directions, they can,” says Maniago.

Customizable directions

Typically, he adds, the API implementation takes the form of a frame set that pops up a new window for the directions while the retailer’s site remains present underneath. That’s the approach taken by Yahoo Maps user sandwich chain Quiznos, which has added the API to its store finder. “They are putting a frame on top of Yahoo Maps in order to keep the user on Quiznos’ site. It’s a low-cost way to provide maps and driving directions and still control the users’ experience by keeping them on Quiznos’ site,” says Maniago.

MapQuest user Sears buys a higher degree of functionality and integrates mapping capacity with its inventory system to let shoppers pull up a page showing, for example, which stores within a designated ZIP Code have a searched appliance in stock, or when they will. Maps and customizable driving directions to those stores (for example, users can choose a different map display format or a route that avoids highways) are accessible through a link on that page.

While map providers get a definite benefit in advertising revenue driven by the fact that more consumers are using their sites, the ROI to retailers, while intuitively obvious, is less clear cut. “When we talk about ROI for mapping on retail sites, we talk about driving traffic to their store and providing higher levels of value to the end user throughout the online experience,” says Dwyer.

If plans for service that opens a window with live inventory status as consumers mouse over a store locations on a map are in the works, other online mapping features that would have seemed like something out of Star Wars a few years ago already are here. Google, for example, has started providing satellite photography with maps. But while such features may be high on wow factor, if consumers are simply trying to find their way to the nearest Wal-Mart that has a pharmacy, do they really care?

The key factor

“The most important thing about maps is that they get people to the right place in the easiest way,” says Booth. And potentially, every retailer with a web site has the ability to offer that service. According to Booth, with database services such as Info USA compiling addresses for virtually every business listing in the country, including retailers, essentially, driving directions for those businesses already exist. Whether or not the companies have integrated them into their own web sites is another matter, but chances are that if they are not providing driving directions on their site to their store, Yahoo, Google and others probably do.

Historically, one reason retailers and other online businesses haven’t incorporated maps on their sites has been the associated expense, but with three free APIs, that reason has receded. “Now that it’s really more about just the time it takes for the IT department to plug the API in, more businesses will start using plug in maps,” says Booth. “Mapping has gone from a nice-to-have to a have-to-have futue.”

mary@verticalwebmedia.com