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Shopping Centers Today -> August 2004
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More online retailers are discovering the virtues of brick-and-mortar. Chad Raney, owner of the www.lonestarmusic.com Texas music store, is one such. “It just made sense,” Raney told the San Antonio Express-News, after opening a store. Three years ago, San Antonio businesswoman Irma Alcala, who sells decorative tiles through an online site (www.arttile.com) and a catalog, did the same. “People kept asking for a store,” she told the newspaper. Of course they did, says Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, a trade group for e-commerce. “There’s a reason people do a majority of their shopping in stores — you can touch things, try them out.”
GOING …
GOING … TO THE STRIP
A recent deal involving eBay is likely to bring more shoppers and revenues to
shopping centers. AuctionDrop and United Parcel Service agreed to allow those
who want to sell things on eBay’s Internet auction site to drop the items
off at any of the 3,400 UPS stores nationwide, many of which are in strips. UPS
ships the merchandise to AuctionDrop, which handles the sale on eBay and mails
the money, minus a commission, back to the seller. 
DELL SELL
Dell made its name by shipping computers directly to the customer, but now it
is using malls to make its name better known. The company is rolling out 65 shopping
center kiosks in 11 states, through which it will showcase — though still
not sell — its products. 
LABOR OF LOVE
Perturbed that only a tiny percentage of the apparel sold in stores is made in
unionized factories, two labor activists, Mandi and Eric Odier-Fink, have founded
Justice Clothing Co., an Internet retail site (www.justiceclothing.com)
where all the merchandise is certified as union-made. “There was nowhere
to go shopping without playing the label-hunting game,” reads the company
history on the Web site. Shoppers visiting the site can rest assured that they
are not buying anything made by “slaves, indentured servants, children, forced
laborers, or otherwise abused and mistreated workers,” the posted message
says. 
eBAY-TIFFANY
TIFF
Tiffany is suing eBay, claiming the latter is making a ton of money from the sale
of fake Tiffany silver and jewelry on its online auction site. About 73 percent
of the items represented on the site as Tiffany are fake, according to a Tiffany
survey in which employees bought merchandise. Charging that eBay failed to police
its site, Tiffany is demanding up to $1 million for each fake sold. 
E-GLOBALIZATION
Just as retailers are increasingly crossing international frontiers, so, too,
are online merchants. To that end, eBay bought Baazee.com, India’s most popular
online retail site, last month, while Google bought a stake in Baidu.com, a Chinese-language
search engine. In April Yahoo bought Kelkoo.com, a France-based online comparison-shopping
service. Some Internet retailers, including Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo, are approaching
the point at which international revenue will outweigh domestic revenue. 
TOYS ‘R’
SUED
Toys ‘R’ Us and Amazon.com are trading lawsuits, and the latter wants
to sever its ties with the toy retailer. In May Toys ‘R’ Us sued Amazon,
claiming that Amazon had violated an agreement that made Toys ‘R’ Us
the sole toy retailer on the site. Amazon has filed a counterclaim, charging Toys
‘R’ Us with failure to honor its obligation to supply enough holiday
toys. Amazon is seeking $750 million in compensation.
Shopping Centers Today
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