With as many as 12,000 products in stores that range from 11,000 to 15,000 square feet, visitors to lighting fixtures retailer Lamps Plus could be overwhelmed by the scope of choices. But that doesn’t happen since Lamps Plus put the search capacities it built for its web site into its stores in the form of kiosks, president and owner Dennis Swanson says.
Lamps Plus in January did a full-scale rollout of web-enabled kiosks in its 40 stores, replicating the search and navigation functionality built into its web site by technology vendor EasyAsk Inc. A key difference between the otherwise nearly identical-looking sites is that the web site as accessed form the store kiosks doesn’t offer the same coupons and map downloads that LampsPlus.com does to entice visitors into the stores.
Swanson says that since most lighting fixture customers shop according to a broad range of product attributes rather than by brand, the site search is designed to support that process. Customers who enter a Lamps Plus store will now often go right to one of the five to six kiosks in a typical store and begin to shop by search rather than initially roaming the store. Putting web access into the stores also has made store sales associates more effective, he says. When they are working with customers at a kiosk, the kiosks automatically generate cross sells for each product the customer has selected at checkout. “That used to be a huge issue in the store. They just had a hard time remembering all of that, particularly new salespeople,” says Swanson.
The web-enabled store kiosks also extend the store’s inventory by displaying items that may not be in a store, but available for quick delivery from the warehouse. That feature has extended each store’s offering by hundreds of items, Swanson says, and sales of such special orders rose immediately by approximately a third when the extended warehouse inventory was added to the kiosks. Lamps Plus is now adding transactional capability to the store kiosks. That will allow store customers to place an Internet order on the web site from the kiosks, input their credit card information to purchase, and arrange for store pick-up or delivery.
Swanson says the increasingly tight integration between his online and offline channels is improving results in both. “Our success in the online world is created by taking our success in the brick-and-mortar world and interpreting it in a way that works online. And the online world has now become more sophisticated. What we learn online we then bring back to the stores, so the stores become better, too,” he says.
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