Google to empower local businesses showcase products online with Pointy

Alphabet’s Google acquired an Irish technology start-up , Pointy with €147 million( $163 million ) deal was happened in the month of January 2020. The Irish retail start-up that helps traditional brick and mortar retailers list inventory online.

Retailers use Pointy’s software to automatically track store inventory. That information is then displayed on Google’s “see what’s in store” section, and on a Pointy page, so customers can find specific items that are in-stock near them.

Over the past several years we’ve developed a very close partnership with Google,” Pointy founders Marks Cummins (CEO) and Charles Bibby (CTO) said in a release. “It became clear that we shared the same vision of how technology can improve local retail businesses.”

Google has long been committed to helping small businesses grow and thrive in the online world. One of the challenges small merchants face is getting their in-store inventory information online in a way that is easy to manage and reliably up to date. Since organizing the world's information is core to what we do, we've been working to make it easier for local merchants to better showcase their products to interested shoppers on Google.


The hardware retails for around $700, but Pointy also has a free app that integrates with specific POS devices from Clover, Square, Lightspeed, Vend, Liberty, WooPOS, BestRx and CashRx POS, removing the need for the hardware. With this it will help thousands of local retailers bring their product inventory online.


With Pointy, merchants simply plug a small box into their barcode scanner or install the Pointy app on their point of sale system, which surfaces the products that they sell directly into the “See what’s in store” section of their business profile on Google Search. Since we introduced this functionality a few years ago, Pointy has been one of our key partners, helping thousands of local merchants display this data within Google. We’re looking forward to working with Pointy to help even more local retailers bring their product inventory online. You can read more in their blog post.