 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Shopping Centers Today -> October 2002
 PRINT THIS STORY: |
  CHANGE TEXT SIZE: |
VISITS TO BARNESANDNOBLE.COM RISE, LOSSES DROP
Barnes & Noble considers itself a master of multichannel synergy when it comes to its superstores and its Web site, launched in 1997.
“We’ve really gone down a path of multichannel bookselling, and we’ve integrated many of the benefits,” said Mitchell Klipper, COO of Barnes & Noble and president of Barnes & Noble Development. “We’ve enhanced the database and inventory management, and integrated our dot-com business.”
And that means increased business offline, too.
“Customers walk into our stores now with a printout of titles from the Web site (www.barnesandnoble.com) and say, ‘Can you help me find these titles?’ They still want to touch and feel the books,” noted Klipper. “It’s a wonderful cross-promotion.”
Customers in New York City who prefer to stay put have an especially good deal: Order a book on the Web site in the morning, and they can have it delivered to them the same day by courier.
That’s a big change over Barnes & Noble’s initial attitude toward the Web. Previously, there was such a clear division between the online and offline businesses that there was no attempt at cross-promotion, and customers who had purchased books online couldn’t even return them at the stores.
“It was to the point where, for the user, it really was inconvenient,” affirmed Lisa Strand, director and chief analyst at NetRatings, a Milpitas, Calif., panel-based research company that tracks Internet behavior. “Barnes & Noble didn’t have the expectation of how [the Web site] would impact their sales and image, and they learned that the offline and online image do go hand in hand.
“Overall, they’re doing very well in the online space, especially with their main competitor being someone as big as Amazon,” she added. “Barnes & Noble is the leading pure play as far as online booksellers. In the latest month that we tracked, they had 5 million people on their site.”
Strand cited the company’s partnership with Yahoo’s shopping area as a move that’s helped to increase Web traffic. “They’re working through online channels, too, to drive traffic and drive people to the Web site,” she said.
That doesn’t mean the Web site has achieved profitability, though. Barnes & Noble.com’s second-quarter net loss totaled $4.5 million, though that’s better than its $6.6 million loss for the year-ago period.
Klipper noted that the Web site’s losses are “coming down exponentially” and that the online company expects to break even by the end of 2003.
— K.P.
 | Current Issue December 2008 |