DisneyDirect.com takes down its interactive catalog
Disney Direct Marketing, which oversees DisneyDirect.com, Disney’s web store, has canceled an interactive catalog program it launched in July 2004.
Disney, which ranks as No. 55 in the Internet Retailer Guide to Top 400 Retail Web Sites, launched an interactive catalog using RichFX Inc. technology, to expedite order processing, present catalog products in greater detail using rich media and drive more traffic to its web store. But the online catalog didn’t produce the customer results Disney expected, David Barad, vice president of marketing for Disney Direct, tells Internet Retailer, so it halted the program earlier this year. “It didn’t translate into the same experience our customers were having with the paper catalog so we canceled the interactive version for now,” Barad says.
Disney’s online store is very well received. DisneyDirect.com often averages as many as 600,000 unique visitors per week and at the peak of the busy holiday shopping season sales conversion rates on popular items can exceed 9%, Barad says. But Disney also found that its core shoppers, young mothers in their 30s with a family and annual household income of more than $65,000, also liked reading the catalog over an extended period and saving each edition to pass along to others, including their children. “They like to get and read the catalog and then order online,” Barad says.
Rather than commit more time and resources to an interactive catalog, Disney is looking at growing the circulation of its print catalog and figuring out other ways to enhance shopping at DisneyDirect.com. “One great thing about the web is that you can test a strategy and learn from the results,” he says. “Right now we are looking at a lot of things to see what works.”
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