PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

High-tech helps PinPoint shoppers

By Candace Talmadge

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, sort of.

As the battle for customers rages between bricks-and-mortar merchants and cyberspace retailers, PinPoint Communications Ltd. is carving out the middle ground. The Wayne, Pa.-based firm regards the Internet not as the enemy, but as a marketing tool that can work to the advantage of traditional shopping centers, the stores within those centers, and the fashion brands sold by the stores.

"We're addressing the needs of time-starved, multi-tasking families," explained John Carragee, president of PinPoint, which was founded in March 1996. "These shoppers have been making fewer trips to malls and fewer trips to stores."

Today's buyers plan their shopping trips much more carefully than in the past, Mr. Carragee noted. They want to know precisely where they are going and what's available in the store when they get there, and they want to find what they need quickly. That's why so many of them are patronizing big box retailers in strip centers, where they can park close to their targeted store and get in and out very quickly.

Most of the nation's enclosed malls, however, were designed for the type of leisurely, several-hour cruise shopping that shoppers no longer have the time to take. That's where PinPoint steps in with its website, www.realmalls.com.

Consumers who visit the Realmalls Website won't be able to buy anything on line. Instead, they find detailed information, arranged on a city-by-city basis, about shopping centers that participate in each locally oriented Website. They learn what stores are located in each center, the center's operating hours and its precise physical location. They can even determine, for example, that if they want to visit Pea in the Pod at Roosevelt Field in Garden City, N.Y., it's best to park next to Macy's.

Interested customers can find links from the shopping center's Website, created and maintained by PinPoint, to the home pages of any retailers located within a participating mall that have chosen to advertise on the mall's website.

Such links are much more useful to retailers than merely providing the phone number of the store within the mall, Mr. Carragee said. The retailer can use its Website to provide information about location and hours of operation as well as tout its own local or national specials and promotions.

Providing such information on a Website helps reduce the number of telephone calls to the store and thus saves staff time that can be devoted more profitably to customers.

PinPoint's on-line shopping directory strategy helps malls build traffic by using the Internet to talk to potential customers efficiently about the malls' fashion goods, entertainment tenants and restaurants.

"This is what distinguishes them (malls) from the big box retailers and on-line merchants," Mr. Carragee pointed out. "Realmalls addresses the entire shopping experience."

On-line shopping directories are especially helpful to apparel and fashion retailers, he continued. Certain goods, such as books, music CDs and computer software, sell extremely well on line because fit and appearance are not critical buying factors. This is not so with fashion merchandise, however.

Mr. Carragee cited a study published in August 1997 by market research firm World Research that found that 81% of on-line shoppers surveyed never expect to buy fashion items on line, regardless of advances in transaction security.

"With fashion merchandise, people want to feel the goods and try things on," Mr. Carragee said.

At present, PinPoint has 950 shopping centers nationwide participating in its Realmalls Website. One client is Corporate Property Investors, New York, owner and operator of Roosevelt Field and 16 other regional and superregional malls throughout the United States.

CPI ventured onto the Internet by developing an in-house Website for Roosevelt Field, but soon found that a stand-alone site was not cost-effective, said Judy Gray, regional marketing director for CPI.

"Some of the best malls have developed websites in the $30,000 to $40,000 range and then stopped them because they were seeing no effect in foot traffic," Mr. Carragee said, adding that some centers and retailers have spent as much as $75,000 to develop their Websites.

PinPoint charges $1,500 to develop and maintain a Website for one shopping center for one year, Mr. Carragee said. The firm charges retailers that advertise on their mall's Website on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis. Each of these range from $20 to $30, Mr. Carragee said.

In addition to developmental expenses, annual Website maintenance can run as high as $6,000, Ms. Gray added. CPI management opted to save time and money by handing off the task to PinPoint, she said. The firm started out last year by developing Websites for six CPI shopping centers and now handles all of them.

"The benefit we believe we receive by utilizing PinPoint is their ability to update information, their technology, access to major traffic sources and minimum management maintenance costs," Ms. Gray said.

Generating and sustaining large traffic volume is key to a Website's usefulness and success, Mr. Carragee noted. To do that, Mr. Carragee is joining forces with other companies to expose the site, and the malls that join it, to a larger audience.

"We provide not just a Website, but traffic through joint ventures. Our strategy is to make our shopping directories available to many Web players. We want to be seen, no matter how people enter the Web," he said.

One such joint venture, announced last fall, is with Denver-based US West Interactive, which operates DiveIn city guides, located at www.divein.com. These Web-based guides are active for 10 cities to date: Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Jacksonville, Fla., Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., and Seattle.

A Web-based city guide is one of the most powerful ways to attract large volumes of potential shoppers, Mr. Carragee said. Such guides provide potential shoppers with information about local activities, dining and entertainment.

Recent studies note shopping is a major goal of tourists, and the city guide can direct them to the closest centers, projects they might not necessarily have discovered on their own.

"The malls are communicating what they have to offer at the same time consumers are making their shopping, dining and entertainment decisions," he explained.

The PinPoint Website is known as www.realshopping.com when it is accessed through a DiveIn city guide. US West partnered with PinPoint to provide the localized shopping content portion of its city guides, said Beth Johansen, acting director of marketing for
DiveIn.

US West Interactive has agreements with other Website content providers as well.

DiveIn city guides provide information in eight categories and numerous subcategories, including personalized services. Local retail exists within personalized services section.

When DiveIn Website visitors click the retail link, they arrive at a bridge page between the DiveIn portion of the city guide and PinPoint's realshopping local directory pages, Ms. Johansen explained.

She also said that personalized services is one of the four top categories for numbers of visits across all 10 DiveIn city guides. Although she declined to provide exact numbers for DiveIn Website traffic, she did say that the number of visitors to DiveIn city guides is rising by about 30% each month.

During the December 1997 holiday shopping season, PinPoint's mall Websites racked up an average of 450,000 page views, defined as one visit to one page, Mr. Carragee said, adding that stand-alone mall Websites don't fare as well.

Much as they do in centers, realmalls' shoppers browse. PinPoint calculates that each shopper performs about 10 page views during one visit to a shopping directory before clicking through to retail advertisers' individual Websites.

At presstime, Website traffic declined in January but was rebounding in February, Mr. Carragee added.

The advantage of partnering is that the page links work both ways to help increase the numbers of visitors for both sides' Websites, Ms. Johansen said. Websurfers primarily interested in dining will be exposed to the shopping data, and vice versa.

DiveIn and PinPoint have run joint promotions in the Atlanta and Denver guides to help drive traffic toward the realshopping section of these Websites, she said.

DiveIn city guides target local residents through content that is lifestyle- and psychographically-oriented, Ms. Johansen said.

The demographics of visitors to its Websites mirror the overall demographics of Web users, with women representing 40%. The 25- to 44-year-old consumer group accounts for a large portion of DiveIn Website visitors, but use among 18- to 24-year-olds is also high, she said.

Mr. Carragee said that one of the biggest surprises for PinPoint has been the numbers of requests for actual maps to the member shopping centers. E-mail response suggests that a fairly high proportion of visitors to its realmalls website are tourists planning shopping opportunities in the cities they plan to visit.