Demo: Compare store inventories in a flash with Wantlet

Wantlet is a new social shopping site that lets consumers compare product listings across several retail stores.

The service, which launched today at the Demo Fall 2011 conference, helps consumers who are looking to purchase something compare prices and find the exact model they want. That can range from finding the right color laptop to a specific kind of camera. Users compare prices and model types at nearby retail stores without having to drive to each individual store and browsing inventory until they find the right model.

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Wantlet is connected with around 50,000 retailers’ internal enterprise resource planning (ERP) services. So when a consumer asks a question about a product, those retailers can quickly respond to the inquiry and convert it to a sale. Conversion rates for retailers using Wantlet were around 50 times higher than pay-per-click advertising programs like those Google employs, Wantlet founder Erno Tauriainen told VentureBeat.

“We all know that most consumers do not like advertising, and advertisers don’t like to advertise to 100 prospects when only 1 percent are true prospects,” Tauriainen said. “It’s a highly inefficient system and fairly unattractive value proposition for advertisers.”

Wantlet was founded in 2007, though the company didn’t begin working on its current project until December 2010. A beta version of the service came out in March 2011. Wantlet has raised nearly $1 million from angel investors and is based in New York, N.Y. The company has nine employees.

Wantlet is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.There’s still plenty to see at DEMO, and VentureBeat readers can get a special discount on registration for the remainder of the show at demo.com/VBDay.