Dive Brief:

• Wal-Mart is ending its participation in Google’s Local Inventory ads, which offer shoppers information on in-stock inventory at nearby brick-and-mortar stores.
• Wal-Mart may be planning to offer shoppers a system to check inventories at area Wal-Mart stores itself instead of disclosing information to a third party. 
• While Local Inventory ads have been slow to take off, chains such as Macy’s, REI, and Office Depot use the service. 

Dive Insight:

Wal-Mart announced it will stop using Google’s Local Inventory ads, which employ merchant-provided inventory information to direct consumers to area brick-and-mortar stores. Google’s Shopping ads have been more successful in directing shoppers to online retailers, but steering them toward local stores has proven challenging.

Sources told The Wall Street Journal that Wal-Mart was increasingly reluctant to share inventory and pricing data with Google. The world’s largest retailer may develop a Web or mobile app that scours only local Wal-Mart inventories to find out what’s in stock, while continuing to use Google’s Shopping ads.

Google doesn’t need to worry, however.

“The kind of inventory-related information that connects people to the products they are looking for before they leave the house is such an advantage to brick-and-mortar retail at this stage that Wal-Mart’s exit from the program should not be too alarming,” Ken Wisnefski, founder and CEO of the internet marketing firm WebiMax, told Retail Dive.

“Wal-Mart, of course, being the largest and most profitable retailer the world has ever seen, can afford (for now) to jump out of that relationship,” he says. “I would venture to say that if current trends in location-based tech in mobile advertising indicate anything, Wal-Mart may be back at a later time.”