Shopping Centers Today -> December 2002
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WHEN ECONOMY’S GRIM, E-TAILERS GRIN
Online shopping will benefit from a weaker economy and a shorter
holiday shopping season, according to some analysts. Penny-pinching
shoppers will be scouring the Internet for bargains, Jeff Fieler,
a Bear, Stearns & Co. analyst, told MSNBC News. And the shorter
season will give them less time to visit stores, said Chuck Davis,
CEO of BizRate.com, in the same report. (ICSC research, however,
indicates that the length of a holiday season has little impact
on retail sales.) ComScore Networks predicts that U.S. Internet
retail sales will grow 27 percent this year, to $13.8 billion.
NEW AT BORDERS: OLD BOOKS
Borders Books and Music is going into competition with secondhand
bookstores. The company has signed a deal with Alibris, an online
secondhand book search service, that will enable shoppers to search
for out-of-print and rare editions on Borders’ self-service
in-store computer kiosks. Borders will then buy the books from Alibris
and sell them to the customer, Borders spokeswoman Ann Binkley told
SCT. Amazon.com has also grabbed a chunk of the online used-book
trade. It snapped up bibliofind.com in 1999.
BELLS, WHISTLES GET CATCALLS, HISSES
Whiz-bang Web site features might excite computer geeks, but they
can drive customers crazy, online retailers have found. J.C. Penney
got rid of its virtual model designed to help shoppers coordinate
clothing items, while Neiman Marcus dumped a jewel-studded shoe
that looked nice enough, but was a bane for those with slow computers
or dial-up connections. “That virtual shoe store was terrific
and fun, but the customer will buy a lot of shoes on our site without
it,” Karen Katch, chairwoman and CEO of Neiman Marcus Direct,
told
The Dallas Morning News.
SHOPPERS PREFER INTERNET RETAILERS MADE OF BRICKS
Though consumers are increasingly using the Internet to buy merchandise,
they also trust it less, according to a report by Consumer WebWatch,
a project of Consumers Union, publisher of
Consumer Reports
magazine and ConsumerReports.org. Only 29 percent of users say they
trust Web sites selling products and services. But sites run by such
conventional retailers as Barnes & Noble, J&R Music &
Computer World and Lands’ End rank highest in consumer confidence,
said Beau Brendler, director of Consumer WebWatch. The study, by Princeton
Survey Research Associates for Consumer WebWatch, involved 1,500 telephone
interviews at the beginning of the year.
TODAY’S BLUELIGHT SPECIAL: $8.4 MILLION
Kmart Corp. at press time was seeking bankruptcy court approval
to sell its Bluelight.com subsidiary to United Online, a nationwide
Internet service provider, for $8.4 million. United Online pledges
that Bluelight’s 165,000 customers will see no interruption
in service. The bankrupt discount retailer set up Bluelight in
late 1989, after abandoning its in-house e-commerce initiative.
This year it switched the name of its online shopping arm to Kmart.com,
retaining the Bluelight name only for its Internet access service.
THEY’RE BACK
Fingerhut, the catalog and online retail company sold by Federated
Department Stores in July, is up and operating just in time for
the holidays. The company, which was bought by its former chief
executive, Ted Deikel, has issued a 216-page catalog of housewares,
electronics, toys and other items, with “Just in time for
the holidays” scrawled across the cover. The operation’s
Web address is Fingerhut.com. Federated paid $1.7 billion for
Fingerhut three years ago, during the dot-com boom, in an unsuccessful
effort to jump-start its nontraditional retailing channels.
CRIME WATCH
Some of the Internet’s biggest e-commerce companies are banding
together to set up a database aimed at identifying and catching
users of stolen credit cards. “We’re trying to construct
a neighborhood watch,” George Redenbaugh, one of the organizers
of the Internet Merchant Fraud Roundtable, told
The New York
Times. While consumers are generally liable only for the first
$50 lost in a fraudulent transaction, retailers have to bear the
full loss. Fraud costs online merchants more than $1 billion a
year, the group says.
