Shopping Centers Today -> January 2003
 PRINT THIS STORY:
|
  CHANGE TEXT SIZE: |
RECORD THEFT
Sales in most sectors of consumer e-commerce have continued to rise,
but this does not apply to recorded music. CD and tape sales over
the Internet are dropping sharply, as more people illegally copy
and trade music online, according to ComScore Networks, an Internet
research company. Last year music sales in the third quarter alone
dropped 39 percent to $121.6 million, from $198.9 million a year
earlier. For the first nine months, sales fell about 25 percent
to $545 million, from $730 million for the same period in 2001,
ComScore said. Overall (online and offline) music sales are also
down, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
TALK TO ME
Online shoppers may in the future be required to talk into their
computers to verify their identities, if a voice recognition system
currently being tested by Visa is adopted. Cardholders would be
asked to provide a sample of their voices for a database and then
would be prompted to say a few words each time they shopped online.
This application could be very feasible, Brad Adrian, a senior research
analyst at Gartner, a Stamford, Conn., technology research firm,
told
SCT.
FROM BITS (OF PAPER) TO BYTES
ShopFast, an online grocery business in Australia, is supplying customers
with scanners to enable them to upload straight onto their computers
the bar codes of products they are running out of. The company predicts
that if the eight-week test of the service works out, it will render
the shopping list obsolete.
COMING TO OUR SENSES
Customers will always want to touch the merchandise, fashion retailers
proclaimed at the height of the dot-com era, trying to assure themselves
and others that they had nothing to worry about from online retailing.
Now Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., the Japanese telecommunications
giant, is developing technology that will, in five to 10 years, allow
the digital transmission of smells and tactile sensations, according
to a report by
Asahi News Service.
COASTS BOAST MORE E-SHOPPERS
Ironically, while New York City, San Francisco and other cities
on the East and West coasts have the biggest concentration of
fancy stores in the United States, their citizens shop on the
Web more often than residents anywhere else in the country, according
to a survey of nearly 7,000 people by America Online. San Francisco,
where the average online shopper spends $225.20 a month on 5.2
purchases, leads the pack, followed closely by New York. Others
topping the list, in declining order, are Sacramento, Los Angeles,
Boston, San Diego and Seattle. “People in those areas are
comfortable with the Internet,” AOL spokeswoman Lisa Gibby
told
SCT.
AMAZON LEARNS FROM WAL-MART
Customers like free delivery, and though such perks have proved
fatal to other dot-coms, Amazon.com has aggressively cut costs
elsewhere to make it pay, observed a recent article in The Wall
Street Journal comparing Amazon’s cost-cutting inventory
management strategy to Wal-Mart’s famously lean operation.
Amazon bundles multiple items rather than mailing them separately,
for instance, and makes money by allowing other merchants to sell
on its site without actually having to process their orders. “We’ve
chosen to offer great prices because we can afford to,” Jeffrey
Wilke, Amazon’s senior vice president of operations, told
the
Journal.
