Shopping on-line: hype and innovation

Julian Mills — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:57:26 -0600

’Tis the season for retail to be to top of mind, whether it’s because you’re making your list and checking it twice, fighting crowds or anxiously watching sales data to gauge the health of consumer spending, the main driver of our economy.

In the Internet world, retail is particularly fascinating now because analysts are trying to gauge on-line versus bricks-and-mortar purchases in the wake of U.S. Thanksgiving, the accepted start date in the frenzied race to acquire goodies to cram under the tree. This year, the story has been about how “Cyber Monday” would compare to “Black Friday.”

The latter phrase was coined to capture the importance of Thanksgiving Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S., when retailers enter “the black” after months of luring semi-disinterested shoppers into their stores with discounted pricing.

The former phrase has only been in usage for a few weeks. It’s the day when shoppers return to the office and start shopping on-line, the location from which 58% of us make our on-line purchases according to comScore Networks.

The phrase also provides more insight about how savvy manipulation of hype-driven media gains attention, rather than providing an accurate measure of retail trends, according to BusinessWeek.

The article reports that Shop.org, an association for retailers that sell on-line, coined the phrase in a November 21 press release claiming Cyber Monday to be “one of the biggest on-line shopping days of the year.” It is, in fact, the 12^th busiest day according to comScore and even trailed November 22 for sales this season.

So should we accuse the on-line retailers of living in a past era, one in which behaviour is driven by hyped events? Not all. This savvy industry understands as well as any that the Internet changes the rhythm of our lives, and is at the forefront of developing web tools that fundamentally change the way we shop.

In its new ranking of the Top 50 Retail Sites, Internet Retailer provides an interesting list of the innovations these companies have developed, including:

Musicnotes.com developed software that displays a page of music, then plays the piece being shown while a cursor indicates which notes are playing.
Peapod.com is equipping its delivery fleet with GPS navigation devices and providing customers with an update on delivery time with an e-mail, text message or phone call when the truck is 10 minutes away.
BestBuy.com offers a kitchen and laundry planner that allows shoppers to create on-line plans of their rooms, then populate them with appliances. They can e-mail the resulting plans to friends, family or builders and print them out to take to the store when they buy the appliances.
Circuit City Stores Inc. guarantees that items bought on-line will be ready to pick up in the local store in 24 minutes.

What the “Cyber Monday” phenomenon demonstrates is that much of the media will respond to a well-written press release with as much alacrity and obedience as parents will to a child’s demand for a hot toy. That approach, and the growth of blogs it helps fuel, is the topic for a different article.

In the meantime, I have to find a pink guitar for a three-year old girl. And I don’t care if I find it on-line or in a store, as long as I find it in time to put under the tree on December 25^th.

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Shopping on-line: hype and innovation