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As I Was Saying

The new dog is learning new tricks

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The last time we had the chance to talk like this, a little over a year ago, the Internet was just a puppy — small and cute and fun to play with. It was so cuddly and manageable, we chose not to think of the day when it might grow bigger.

Look what a year has brought! I no more turn my back than the puppy is a full-grown bull mastiff threatening to take over the house.

The 1999 holiday shopping season was retail.com run amok. Online retailing racked up $12 billion in sales, triple the 1998 figure. But then came the post-mortem: Shoppers complained that sites were too often blocked, under construction or otherwise inaccessible, or crashed at the busiest times of day. And Andersen Consulting reported that a full 25 percent of all e-retail deliveries were flawed — arrived late or didn't arrive at all, arrived wrong, arrived damaged, were returned. We learned that online shopping hasn't yet supplanted the good old full-dimensional store — for now.

But Internet retailers are now switching their energies to their site designs, hoping to make them more — how's this for a concept? — entertaining. Background music. Videos. Interactive games. Contests. Online fashion shows. Alluring celebrity images. Informative lectures. Why did you never think of that for your stores?

Fact is, you can tell them a thing or two about the challenges of trying to make a shopping environment entertaining. Namely, it sounds easier than it is. For one thing, it can be a real budget-breaker. Yahoo Broadcast, one of several providers of Internet multimedia services (it conducted an online Victoria's Secret fashion show), charges up to $100,000, depending on the amount of customization and production assistance required. Now the onus will really be on the Internet to deliver sales profitably.

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And do shoppers truly respond to all that activity? One of the post-holiday criticisms of online shopping was that many sites were too cluttered, too gimmicky, too hard to navigate, or just visually unpleasant. (Sound familiar?) Furthermore, much of the online presentation depends on the ability of the shopper's computer to download quickly, contain certain multimedia programs and display images clearly.

In fact, webmasters will have as much of a challenge making goods appealing on their sites as you've had making goods appealing in-store. They may know their URLs and HTMLs, but it remains to be seen how much they know about visually stimulating shoppers to buy.

How can you get in on this game? The more forward-thinking retail design outfits are already positioning themselves as full-service design/branding firms. (Why am I not surprised that J'Amy Owens at The Retail Group is one of the first to begin developing web-specific retail?) And the more forward-thinking in-house designers and planners must also find ways to insinuate themselves into this phenomenon.

Because this huge canine isn't going away. Rather, it will keep getting bigger and more clever, learning new tricks all the time. Already, it's being taught to sing and dance.

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