• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 10, 2011

Smartphone users augment in-store shopping with mobile devices. I do. A Ralphs grocery store promotion touting 30% off wine, beer and liquor got me to pull out my iPhone while in the store to search the Internet for phone numbers of local retailers, checking prices at Bevmo and Sam's Club for a bottle of Perrier Jouet champagne.

Bevmo's discounted price listing at about $5 less than Ralphs' sale price seems like a good deal, but the Sam's Club price of another $4 made the great champagne taste even better. Since I rarely drink -- about half a dozen times yearly -- it's difficult for me to keep up with champagne prices. I'm not the only consumer willing to research and compare prices to save a few bucks; in this case about $10 on one bottle.

Mobile in-store research enables consumers to compare competitors’ prices, read customer reviews and access special offers while at the point of purchase, writes eMarketer Analyst Jeffrey Grau in a report titled "Local Commerce: How Consumers May Find Nearby Retailers," published this month. Retailers should view this trend as an opportunity to market goods and services by leading consumers from the Web into stores.

Search marketers look for the consumer's intent to purchase a product. Mobile easily identifies that intent by making the connection between research and purchase much closer. Grau writes: "With mobile in-store shoppers, who research while standing before a product under consideration, these two actions are occurring simultaneously. For marketers, a mobile user with local intent presents an opportunity to influence a person who is ready to buy."

Online sales accounted for only 5.8% of total U,S, retail sales. Almost all of the remaining 94% of retail sales occurred in brick-and-mortar stores, according to eMarketer calculations based on U.S. Department of Commerce retail data. With those numbers in mind, the eMarketer report focuses on consumer awareness and use of digital services that influence in-store purchases, and identifies opportunities for retailers to drive local business through online and mobile marketing.

And then I thought about turning on the location-based feature in my phone, opting in to a Ralphs frequent buyers program, and identifying my desire to purchase a bottle of Perrier Jouet through searches on google.com while in the store. The retailer could identify my intent and electronically send me a coupon that would discount the price more. Oh, right. That's just a wish and not yet reality. Google Offers when supported by Google Wallet comes close.

The reality is that the use of local search engines and directories, such as Internet Yellow Pages, continues to grow among smartphone users. eMarketer points to a Compete report showing that visitors to local search sites in June 2011 rose 27% from the prior year. Yelp had 74% annual growth. Yellowpages.com, with 27 million unique visitors in June 2011, recorded 92% annual growth. Its mobile traffic rose 17.5% in visitor traffic in June 2011, sequentially, to 3.7 million visitors.

A variety of tools can lead consumers from the Internet into stores as more consumers look for instant gratification and information through searches on smartphones while in stores. Efficient Frontier and equity research firm Macquarie Securities presented findings from a recent mobile study Wednesday that suggest click-to-call mobile ad campaigns typically lead to conversions unless it takes the retailer more than 25 or 30 seconds to answer the phone.