PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

FEDERATED FINDS THAT ‘E’ MEANS ‘EXPENSIVE’

Federated Department Stores has scrapped its bloomingdales.com e-tailing site, is eliminating apparel on macys.com and is also doing away with its Macy’s and Fingerhut catalog operations, sharply curtailing a three-year foray into multichannel commerce. Online retail sites are very expensive to run, especially considering that most people use them only for product information, Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard’s Retail Consulting Group, told SCT. “It’s a very good move.”

 

SOME LIKE IT COLD

Residents of cold-climate states are more likely to buy online than those living in warmer climes, with Alaska leading the way, according to a BizRate.com report on the recent holiday season. In Alaska sales per person were $43.99, compared with $9.68 for each Mississippian. Other states leading in online retail include New Hampshire ($37.60 per resident), Connecticut ($35.37) and Vermont ($33.68). “Online shopping saves stress on people’s lives, and this is particularly the case in snowbound areas,” Liane Hearst, vice president of research at BizRate, an online electronics retailer, told SCT.

FULFILLING WORK In a cost-cutting move, ASDA, the British supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart Stores, is shutting down two warehouses used to serve online customers and will instead supply them with goods taken directly out of its stores. As such, it is adopting the model of rival Tesco, the British-based supermarket chain that operates a highly successful online grocery service. So will Wal-Mart be taking any leaves out of its subsidiary’s book? So far there is no talk of serving online customers from its stores, Wal-Mart.com spokeswoman Cynthia Lin told SCT. As yet, the discounter doesn’t ship groceries.

ONLINE SEX CHANGE

While women have always outnumbered men at the malls, males have for a long time made up the majority of Web shoppers. Not anymore. For the first time ever, women purchasing from retail Web sites outnumbered men this past holiday season, accounting for 58 percent of all shoppers, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

 

TALKING HEADS

Customer service remains an issue for hard-pressed e-tailers, but one firm claims it can solve that problem while saving retailers the expense of hiring additional staff. Finali Corp.’s netSage, a “socially intelligent” automated “virtual agent,” not only answers simple questions but also projects a moving, talking human figure onto the customer’s screen. “He handles primarily order-related things,” Liz Wallace, Finali’s vice president of performance optimization, told SCT, explaining that, for instance, Buy.com’s agent, whose name is Ian Stone, will tell shoppers whether an item has been shipped. Dell Computer’s automated agent, called Reuben, helps the customer pick the right computer by asking a series of questions.

 

MULTICHANNEL MONKS

Cistercian monks have maintained an isolated community on Caldey Island, off the coast of Wales, for more than 1,000 years. To support themselves the monks have allowed day visitors onto the island during the summer months, relying on their gift-store purchases to help sustain the community the rest of the year. Alas, these days that is no longer enough, so the monks have resorted to another strategy: multichannel retailing. Having already established a mail-order business, the monks have taken their retailing business a step further by launching a shopping Web site (www.caldey-island.co.uk).

© 2008 ICSC. All rights reserved. | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy | Contact ICSC | ICSC Home |