BACKGROUND

The COVID19 pandemic has changed many retail-based business practices based on current public health directives. Governments are now advising citizens to minimize virus exposure times by staying at home as much as possible and only leaving home for necessities while wearing masks and observing social distancing rules. Yet, retailers have designed store layouts, checkout systems, advertising, and product shelf placement to encourage customers to come to their stores and stay within their stores for as long as possible.

Online consumer transactions were already growing at surprising rates before the pandemic with online sales growth consistently eclipsing in-store sales growth year over year. Now retailers are actively attempting to reduce in-store customer traffic at the same time that consumers are intentionally avoiding in-store purchases whenever feasible. The result has been exponential online sales growth even for traditional grocery stores, which were not experiencing large online sales pre-pandemic, but some retailers have not benefit as much as they believe they should be during the pandemic.

Online sales are largely driven by the search engines for consumers who do not use online aggregators, such as Amazon®. Unfortunately, search engines pitch their preferred retailers in search results and some search engines redirect purchases to their own purchasing services. Moreover, many retailers lack any substantial online presence and most consumers are unaware that local retailers may have online ordering services. As a result, retailers are struggling during the pandemic to achieve the online sales growth that they should be experiencing.

Further, COVID19 has disrupted product supply chains and manufacturing product inventories. Consequently, consumers are actually venturing out of their homes for products only to find that such products are out-of-stock. This is frustrating to both the consumers, retailers, suppliers, and manufacturers; and this potentially exacerbating the spread of COVID19 by increasing virus exposure times.

Most consumers, who want a product immediately, are reluctant to order the product online when delivery dates are estimated to be in the distant future (e.g., more than a few weeks out from the online order date). Typically, a search engine will not identify whether a product in its search results is in-stock or out-of-stock for any given retailer and consumers must click a variety of links to checkout with the product before the consumers discover that the product is out-of-stock. Many search results for products include links to a single retailer site that manages all stores for that retailer. So, the consumer has to make sure they go through more interface screens to ensure they are at the proper store of the retailer where they want to pick up an online order. Additionally, a significant number of popular retailers have multiple stores within a few miles from the consumer's location and many consumers do not know the address to the closest retailer (they know how to get there from their homes, but they do not know the actual address). This further complicates the online ordering experience for the consumer. Some consumers may actually show up at the wrong store from where they originally placed an order.

As a result, consumers are placing more online orders (particularly because of the pandemic) but are frustrated and confused by a variety of issues: product availability, ease of online ordering, and store locations. Similarly, retailers are frustrated because they feel like they are not benefiting from the surge in online orders and they feel as if the search engines are not being particularly beneficial when their customers are looking for their products, and in some cases, the search engines may be actively steering consumers away from the retailer's products.

SUMMARY

In various embodiments, methods and a system for integration of retail services with a search engine are presented.

According to an aspect, a method for integration of retail services with a search engine is presented. For example, an activation is received from a browser operated by a user and a reference associated with the activation is identified. An Application Programming Interface (API) associated with the reference is obtained and a retailer service associated with a retailer is interacted with using an API call of the API based on the reference. Information returned from the retailer service based on the API call is rendered within a web page for presentation within the browser to the user.

