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Inspector Gadget of Fashion P.D.
Description: Dodgeville, Wisc.
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After grounding brick & mortar model, Egghead takes flight as dot-com
Description: Two months after taking over Egghead, Orban shut down half the retail stores. Not only did we have to shut down the chain and lay off a lot of people, Orban says, but we had to liquidate tens of millions of dollars in inventory. He then had to figure out what could be built around the remains of the business. There appeared to be two paths: build a larger store prototype and incorporate other PC products or focus the company on the Internet.
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E-retailers may be hastening their own demise if they make the wrong fulfillment choice
Description: One of the first costs to consider is the amount of capital invested in a fulfillment process. Retailers need to look at what cost structure they can support, Schatsky says. Do they have the resources and expertise to build out and operate an in-house fulfillment operation? Outsourcing is the way to manage costs and minimize capital investments.
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Play time
Description: Santa Monica, Calif.
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The Sales Tax Issue Is Alive and Well
Description: Congress takes up the contentious tax issue, but consumers dont really care
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They shoot, they score
Description: Chicago, Ill.
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MVP.com is a content champ, but needs to set itself apart from brick competitors
Description:
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Customer makeup data is more than a cosmetic feature for online beauty retailer
Description: he great thing about the Internet is that it makes gathering information so easy. Post a survey on an e-retailing site and the data will soon follow. But then the real work comes: Using the data as a selling tool.
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The longest mile
Description: Foster City, Calif.
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Kmart`s not signing the blues
Description: San Francisco, Calif.
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King of the jungle
Description: Seattle, Wash.
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How a small over-the-counter remedy marketer used online sales to create offline success
Description: Pure Lip launched its prevention product in September 1999, then its remedy product in June 2000just one year after Moffitt hired his first employee, President Nicholas Meyer. Meyer, a fellow Georgetown grad, brought retail experience to the company following a career in advertising where he developed domestic and international brand for Wendys International. By September 2000, the products had reached drugstore shelves.
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Ashfords CEO brings the focus of a concert pianist to online luxury retailing
Description: The strength of mom-and-pop businesses is their ability to know and serve customers in a timely and personal manner. But can a model that has been successful for small shop owners work for a retailer that sells $70 million in luxury goods per year through the impersonal Internet?
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Wine site is no cellar dweller
Description: Portland, Ore.
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Beyond the paperclip
Description: Framingham, Mass.
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How targeted marketing can help online retailers land the big one
Description: Casting a net in deep water may be an effective way to catch a lot of fish. But those just looking for marlin will waste a lot of effort throwing the mackerel over board. Learning where the marlin are and how they behave can take the guesswork out of deep-sea fishing. Likewise, Internet retailers who bought banner ads on high-traffic sites are beginning to exchange their nets for poles.
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Topper site is tops
Description: Westwood, Mass.
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Town folks` wisdom
Description: San Francisco, Calif.
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Corkscrew Turns
Description: WineAccess.com takes yet another approach. WineAccess is a host site that connects visitors with local wine dealers. By entering a ZIP code, a WineAccess.com visitor is taken to the home pages of wine retailers that sell in that area. Customers can order online and pick up the wine from the local store.
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Take no prisoners
Description: Hoffman Estates, Ill.
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Cooler than the arcade
Description: New York, N.Y.
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To serve and protect: FTC director is both teacher and cop to online retail community
Description: Bernstein got her introduction to the Internet shortly after returning to the FTC. In 1995, several incidents of garden-variety fraud on the Internet caught the FTCs attention, many involving work-at-home scams. The question then was were these cases too small and too local for federal involvement, she says. There were also questions of who had jurisdiction over this new thingthe Internet. Because of the Internets far-reaching capabilities, it was my assessment this was not a local matter, she says. It was my instinct as much as anything else that this new market had the potential to be a huge market. And far-reaching, nationwide markets traditionally fall under the FTCs jurisdiction. My view was we better step up to the plate, she says. To me the Internet was just another new marketplace. However, she adds, in 1995, she had no idea how big or important this new marketplace would become.
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New channel, same commitment
Description: Seattle, Wash.
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Sell Global, Think Local
Description: A milestone came nearly three years ago when Office Depot and Viking Office Products merged. At that time, Viking was a catalog retailer in 10 countries with two-thirds of its business coming from outside the U.S. Nelson was Vikings COO and Viking had an infrastructure of offices and warehouses.
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Like yogurt, its got culture
Description: Arlington, Mass.
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Printing technology plays the match-maker
Description: The buzz about greetings cards on the Internet has been e-cards. Who hasnt been captivated by a dancing, singing elephant thanking you or wishing you happy birthday?
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Puttin` on the Ritz
Description: Houston, Texas
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Online vs. in line: The coming battle over how college kids buy their textbooks
Description: The college student is one of the savviest and most sought after consumers on the Internet. And every year, regardless of trends, there is one thing they all buy: textbooks, almost $3 billion worth annually.
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The steps to identifying and choosing the right search engine optimization expert
Description: Search engines are the primary way most people find new web sites, but web site designers forget this when they create sites. Often, site designers make the mistake of building the web site, then contacting a search engine optimization specialist to ensure the site is search-engine friendly.
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Personalization without privacy won`t sell; build trust by keeping customers informed
Description: Weve heard a lot about how personalization technology helps Web retailers: by increasing the ratio of browsers to buyers, giving stores a way to upsell and cross-sell and strengthening customer loyalty. What we havent heard as much about are the customers benefitsor risks.
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No Fear
Description: Give the green light for online buying with high-assurance SSL certificates
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10 questions
Description: Shining a light on a marketing vendor: How to create a successful relationship
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Ought to be in pictures?
Description: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what might a moving picture be worth? Convinced the answer is bigger sales, Internet retailers have been turning to streaming video. Offering sites a dynamic and interactive new way to communicate with their customers, streaming video represents an appealing way for merchants to add a new dimension to their online ambience.
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Shape up, ship out
Description: E-retailers have learned the hard way about the importance of keeping up with consumer demand for their products. Fulfillment problems during the 1999 holiday season meant everything from stockouts and late orders to a high-profile lawsuit filed against Toys R Us by a customer angry about its failure to ship hers and hundreds of other Christmas orders on time. Last year, the focus was on the Web storefront, says Gene Alvarez, e-business program director at the Meta Group, a technology consulting firm based in Stamford, Conn. Toys R is a great example of needing to focus on technology at the back end. The rules of retail are fulfill, fulfill, fulfill.
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Marketing Out-of-the-Box packs merchandising know-how with high-touch reliability
Description: The past holiday season, like the one before it, offered stark lessons in e-retailing fulfillment. Consumers gave their lowest marks to on-time deliveries and customer service during the Christmas season, according to Internet rating firm BizRate. Merchants handled nearly 34 million orders between Nov. 26 and Dec. 25, but only 74% were delivered on time, down slightly from the previous year. Companies must wake up is the plain admonition of a report on logistics published last August by Forrester Research. The firm foresees a fundamental shift in fulfillment as consumers and businesses send the number of online orders soaring to 2.1 billion by 2003. As small parcel deliveries expand, Forrester says the number and breadth of SKUs will explode, and customers will continue to raise their expectations.
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You`ve got sales
Description: E-mail marketing is an attractive medium both for appealing to new customers and retaining past ones by updating them on a sites offerings and promotions. E-retailers are finding e-mail to be a cost-effective and high-response approach to promoting products and reinforcing branding, and its growing as more e-retailers turn to e-mail newsletters as a way to boost click-through rates and sales. By 2005, commercial e-mail is expected to become a $7.3 billion market, according to a new study released in May by Jupiter Communications Inc. But as the volume of e-mail increases, e-retailers must pursue it with sensitivity or they risk driving away the customers whose loyalty they are seeking.
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Card verification numbers serve offline world, but are they a remedy for Internet card fraud?
Description: Unlike their offline counterparts, Internet retailers have not benefited from recent declines in overall U.S. credit card fraud rates. In fact, credit card fraud online is rising. Meridien Research Inc. estimates that fraud losses last year on Internet payments topped $1.6 billion and would have reached $2 billion if some fraud detection systems had not been in place already.
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Boxing Match
Description: Drop shipping still has its fans, but champs like Amazon and eToys are dropping out. Is the mixed model a winner?
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Tim Harrington`s Fogdog is no longer a pup, but it`s no billion-dollar show dog---yet
Description: Experience
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With offline sales flat, greeting card companies see the Internet boom as occasion for growth
Description: Although greeting card companies aim to make people laugh, smile or at least feel better, its serious business. In 1998, the latest figures available, consumers spent $7.5 billion to buy cards the old-fashioned way in supermarkets, drugstores, stationery shops, and other traditional retailers. The race is on for the Internet market, and the major players are offline leaders Hallmark and American Greetings, with dark horse Blue Mountain Arts solidly in the running to dominate the virtual market. Forrester Research estimates that online greeting-card sales will skyrocket almost fivefold in the years ahead, from $68 million in 1999 to $320 million in 2003. Though Internet sales are still nickel-and-dime stuff to the industrys titansonline revenue, for instance, accounted for less than 1% of Hallmarks $3.8 billion in 1998 salesthe possibilities for retail synergy are written in large letters. Greeting card companies are essentially in the communication business, so the online information explosion, combined with the increasing popularity of e-mail, is a natural for driving up sales. The big question is whether print or electronic cards will attract the most consumers. Though print cards have become more sophisticated, theyre no match for the Internets wow-em graphics. E-cards offer sound, animation, and interactive, do-it-yourself technology that can excite even the most jaded online user. Powerful messages in small packages can be used by perceptive marketers to grab online consumers with short attention spans and itchy mouse fingers. Since the Internet offers more of everything, Web sites where consumers can download and send free greeting and postcards abound. Hundreds of electronic postcard sites make every conceivable image available to send via e-mail. Electronic greeting contenders also are luring customers with various sales incentives and greeting gimmicks. E-cards.com, for example, contributes a small amount to the World Wildlife Fund for every card sent. And greeting-cards.com claims to be the biggest animated musical greeting card store on the Internet, with 30% of its customers coming back for more. Putting aside these and other Internet upstarts like Barking Cards, the big three are competing as aggressively on the Web as they do offline, where business jockeying continues. In November, American Greetings bought Gibson Greetings for $162 million. The merger is expected to give American Greetings about 36% of the paper card market. Companies that are creatures of the Internet, with nary a brick laid to mortar, dominate many areas of e-commerce. Not so with the three dominant Internet card companies. All started as creators and sellers of paper cards, and each has a strong history and reputation. In a business built on finding ways to help people express their emotions, the integrity of the brand name is all-important.
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Search Strategy
Description: Five things to consider when evaluating pay-per-click management tools
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How the dot-com jitters have wrung some of the craziness out of the job market
Description: Nevertheless, the reality at the moment is that many companies are laying people off. And companies like Bluelight.com are picking them up. BlueLight.com recently hired people from Petstore.com, Reel.com and Homewarehouse.com, and BlueLights hiring activity and the availability of experienced engineers dont look to let up. The number of resumes BlueLight is receiving has increased from 20 a week in February to 50 a week nowand much of the additional resumes are coming from staffers at failed or failing dot-coms.
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It`s survival of the fastest. As broadband grows, so will pressure to add multimedia apps
Description: Even with todays predominately slower connection speeds, features boosted by broadband are in hot demand for good reason. Clothier Lands End, for instance, more than doubled its Internet sales from $61 million to $138 million last year, after adding features that allow customers visiting its site to to fit clothing on virtual models, mix and match various styles and colors of Oxford cloth shirts, and shop the site by linking browsers with a friend or customer service representative. Lands End executives stop short of making a precise connection between these new features and the higher sales, yet they say some influence is certain. In e-mails praising the new features, customers have vowed to return to the site or make it it their exclusive online clothier.
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Though still striving to be heard above the noise, e-retailers tone down their ad spending
Description: The first quarter was good to Pets.com, with revenue bounding by 40%. And for that, some credit is due the e-retailers celebrated spokespuppetthe sassy spotted dog featured in its national TV advertising campaign. In fact, the puppet is so celebrated that Pets.com is selling clones at $20 per, limit three.
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DVD e-retailer takes off to the Great White North
Description: DVD e-retailer takes off to the Great White North Infinity Resources Inc. has expanded its DeepDiscountDVD brand into the Canadian e-commerce market with the launch of its new
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Nine of top 10 hardware sites experience double-digit growth in January
Description: Nine of top 10 hardware sites experience double-digit growth in January Visits to nine of the top 10 online hardware manufacturer sites increased by double digits in January,
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SPS COMMERCE PROVIDES HOSTED SUPPLY CHAIN INTEGRATION SERVICES TO BURLINGTON COAT FACTORY
Description: -- National Retailer to Utilize Multiple Order Management Models to Enable Electronic Transactions with Suppliers for Distribution Center and Ship to Store Orders --
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GroceryWorks finishes shopping, names Matt Gutermuth new president
Description: GroceryWorks finishes shopping, names Matt Gutermuth new president GroceryWorks has named Matt Gutermuth its new president. He succeeds Mitchell Rhodes, who left the company late
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Overstock.com finds the link between excess inventory and artisan goods
Description: Overstock.com finds the link between excess inventory and artisan goods Online liquidator Overstock.com this week opened a new department that will sell handcrafted products from
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Q1 online wine sales via the Nexternal platform grow 46% over Q1 `05
Description: Q1 online wine sales via the Nexternal platform grow 46% over Q1 `05 Wine sales through Nexternals e-commerce software totaled more than $12.4 million in the first quarter of
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