• by Gavin O'Malley , December 2, 2010

Feeding into the frenzy around local commerce and services, eBay on Thursday confirmed the acquisition of local shopping site Milo.com. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but reports put Milo's price tag at $75 million.

Milo.com is a shopping search engine that lets online users search through the stock of local brick-and-mortar retailers.

The grab reflects eBay's interest in the local, real-world retail business -- a white-hot market, as evidenced by Google's reported $6 billion offer to buy Groupon.

"Local commerce companies like Milo are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping," Mark Carges, chief technology officer and SVP of global products at eBay Marketplaces, said on Thursday.

By acquiring Milo and integrating its technology, eBay said it can now give consumers access to millions of products from roughly 50,000 stores nationwide, while eBay sellers can more easily reach more shoppers.

"Since eBay is an online marketplace and doesn't compete with brick-and-mortar stores, adding local store inventory to the eBay marketplace is a natural extension of what we've been doing for 15 years," Carges added.

Citing comScore data, eBay claims to have handled over 2 billion U.S. product searches in the third quarter of the year.

Through the addition of Milo, eBay plans to bring the inventories of ever more small local retailers online, and to help existing eBay sellers -- with brick-and-mortar locations and compatible inventory systems -- to sell locally.

In addition, eBay said its barcode-scanning iPhone application RedLaser will soon be available with the addition of Milo local results.

With big money at stake, tech giants and retailers are presently racing to close the gap between online and real-world commerce.

Forrester predicts that cross-channel shopping -- researching online, buying offline -- sales will be $1.3 trillion, and will and account for nearly 50% of total retail sales -- by 2013.

Milo's investors included Keith Rabois, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Aydin Senkut, Aaron Patzer, and Jawed Krim, to name a few.