Barnes & Noble and Petsmart both announced stronger than expected earnings on Thursday. Retailers may finally be solving the multi-channel issue regarding stores and the web.

Are you ordering from web sites and picking up at the store to save shipping charges? That's what Amazon and Circuit City hope you'll do. Amazon will begin shipping to Circuit City stores (who are flush with cash from spinning off a huge chunk of its Carmax subsidiary). CDs and videos won't be included, but if you know the specific audio or video component you want to buy, you can save shipping by using Amazon's price and picking it up yourself at Circuit City.

Hot new trend or just a dying gasp from the online crowd as the big boys start moving full-force to the web?

Hey!

They are finally buying a clue! Good for them!

The internet is nothing more than another means to interact with customers. It is part of a mix.

The biggest mistake of dot comdom <--- (giggle) was thinking that dot com was a completely different animal than had ever existed before and that it could stand on its own.

Lands End can make good money off of their web orders, but the internet is not going to replace sending catalogs out.

If Amazon can take what it has built and successful integrate with partners with bricks, they will survive and they will prosper. I've always believe, BTW, that Amazon would be one of the few left standing at the end of all of this.

Remains to be seen, though, yes?

Andrea
who is not personally picking anything up anywhere, but she's a internet geek

Good for them! I would definitely go to Circuit City to pick up my Amazon orders if I don't have to pay shipping. It just galls me to pay shipping costs for books that I know are exaggerated (the costs, not the books).

When I lived on Okinawa, I frequently sent books to my parents, ordered from Amazon. I was charged full price to have books shipped from Amazon's warehouse, in Fernley, Nevada, to my parents house, in Fernley, Nevada. They could have walked there in less time and saved a little money.

--naomi

People really do hate to pay shipping, don't they?

I'm currently running a little experiment on "free freight".

All of my orders (at work) come from insituitions (universities, hospitals, goverment) or reasonably sized businesses. I'm desperate to get customers to cough up the "keycode" on the back of the catalog so I can track the performance of different mail lists, etc....but I can't get the numbers. Most of our orders go through a purchasing cycle by the time they come to us and the person ordering doesn't have the key code number.

Got the bright idea awhile back to make the keycode number a "coupon number". Big offer - up to $100 off your order. Who would give up $100?? Well, 98% of the people who ordered from me, that's who. Miserable compliance rate.

I just changed the offer on my latest catalog to FREE FREIGHT! Up to $75. Not only is the total value less than the previous coupon, but, on many individual orders the freight might only be $25 or $30...

So, I'm dying to see if this coupon does better than the previous one. I think it will. People really hate to pay shipping.

Andrea

Andrea, hope you discover something. The only thing I discovered in 15 years of sales was that it was a hairraising experience to try to guess how a consumer is going to act.

I think a lot of web models were originally based on the premise that you'd have to pay shipping, but mostly you'd avoid paying sales tax. I dunno, but I'm glad I'm out of that circus. In retrospect, it seemed like price and service had less to do with retaining customers than overcoming the fact that many thought they'd get "ripped off" if they bought online. Of course, that's just my skewed perspective....

Quote:Originally posted by HomeBizWriter
Andrea, hope you discover something. The only thing I discovered in 15 years of sales was that it was a hairraising experience to try to guess how a consumer is going to act.

ROFLMAO!!

Welcome to my life!

Andrea
who has a Magic 8 Ball help with most decisions...and that's the truth!

I experimented with free shipping back in the day when we were handling mostly books. I suspect your promotion would do better on the web - where you don't need a source code - than over the phone.

A couple of thoughts for driving up source code capture:

1) Provide a cash incentive (say $2) for each of your operators for every code they capture.

2) Make your key codes simple three digit numbers and have them route to your phone system as an extension. For example, the phone is answered by an automated system and the customer is prompted to enter the extension.

3) Rather than allow dollars off an item that is likely already budgeted, offer a personal premium when mentioning the keycode. You'll have to use some pretty snazzy graphics to call out the keycode, but the good news is that the premium doesn't have to be more than a $5 Blockbuster gift card. Why Blockbuster? They're penetrated into virtually every market and have something for almost everyone. Theme = When work is over, enjoy a movie on us.

There are more, but it's too early, and I'm on vacation. Anyone else wanna be creative?

George - Thanks for the brainstorming! I stubbornly insist on having unique circumstances in both my personal and professional lives that make conventional wisdom nearly impossible to apply.

The biggest problem is very often that the person placing the order with us doesn’t have the original catalog or key code. Many of our orders run through purchasing departments. The only way the purchasing person who calls the order in (or faxes it over) would have the number is if the end user (actual order generator) is compelled by something extraordinary to place the coupon code on the paperwork so that the purchasing agent ends up with it. (And no, asking purchasing to go get the coupon number from the order generator doesn’t work, we’ve tried. By the time it gets to them, they don’t care, they want to place the order and get off the phone.)

Also, our average order size is much higher than you usually find in direct mail. We average $720 an order…and it’s not unusual to pick up a $5000 purchase order from the fax machine. That means any incentive has to be substantial enough to catch attention, in proportion to the size of the order. (You best believe I’d kill to know which list generated that $5000 purchase order.)

As far as personal premiums/incentives for orders go, I’m uncomfortable with that. I know that other business to business direct marketers do it…but, it just doesn’t seem kosher to me. (Okay, truth, I’ve tried them, tastefully and tied in with a certain theme, and they didn’t perform anyway. J ) We do send thank you gifts after people place orders, but I don’t like to hang them out there as the reason to order from us. The reason to order from us is that we’ll do a better job for your business than anyone else will. Make sense? Does in my brain.

So anyway, here I am trying Free Freight as the incentive to get the customer to cough up the codes.

Shrug. We’ll see.

It’s awfully hard on a numbers junkie to not have enough numbers to analyze.

Andrea