BIA/Kelsey reported today on Wishpond’s position in the ever-expanding local online advertising industry, and how it’s differentiating itself as a platform for local businesses, not just national chains: [Wishpond] has signed up 1,700 retailers in the U.S. and Canada and seeks to differentiate itself by enabling merchants to upload their product inventory in a variety of ways. In addition to providing retailers with free self-serve management tools, merchants can import their inventory via Web crawling, shopping cart plug-ins, batch upload, through their Point of Sales system and other methods. Wishpond also goes beyond inventory by adding real-time price checks, stock availability checking and merchant meta data. It offers this data to publishers and mobile app developers through an open API. We don’t comment here on how unique these solutions are. All the contenders in the space claim to be unique. But the combination of broader reach and inventory upload options have helped Wishpond build an inventory of six million products, or twice as many as reported by Milo.com, which has some local stores but is more focused on a number of large, core accounts. Click here to read the full article.