Cruel crewel world

In January, the Internet was going to force Federated, The Limited and May Co. out of business. By October, the Internet had become the scourge of the needlepoint industry.

Since people across the country can now download needlepoint patterns off the Internet, or e-mail them back and forth to each other, the companies that make their living publishing and selling the patterns are being hurt. One needlepoint publisher saw sales drop 40 percent in three years and had to let six freelance designers go.

I'm in no way minimizing the hurt to those companies, or to the freelance designers now looking for other work. But to go in 10 months from the demise of billion-dollar retail organizations to the demise of needlepoint publishers is a sea change of gravitas.

So what has happened to the Internet e-tailing revolution? A lot of overblown predictions, poorly conceived calculations, too-ambitious business plans, unrealistic expectations. And the online shopping experience itself too often stinks. Clutter and confusion. Slow, unresponsive customer service. Lack of information. If any of that were happening in your stores, you'd be learning to say, “Try our Happy Meal!”

According to Forrester Research, e-retailers could be realizing an additional $20 billion in sales per year by examining such basic shopper needs as speed and simplicity, ease of navigation and use — focusing on exactly what visitors do once they are on site. How easy is it for web shoppers to find goods? To compare prices? To know if an item is in stock? To check out?

One of the chief offenders, interestingly, is marthastewart.com. Way too much merchandise ends up being unavailable only after the site visitor has filled up her shopping cart. Martha says “we're working on it.” But her fulfillment provider, the Time Customer Service unit of Time Warner, explains that it has an older computer system that takes awhile to search the database. (Math question for tonight's homework: Shouldn't Martha Stewart Time Warner = enough resources for a sophisticated computer system?)

Inadequate infrastructure is certainly part of the problem. But so are poorly designed shopping sites that are confusing, time-consuming, slow, crowded and uninformative. The heart of the problem, it seems, is too little thinking about and trying to understand what makes shoppers click on ADD TO MY SHOPPING CART versus what makes them click on I'M OUTTA HERE.

This is all Retailing 101, of course. So the traditional retailers should know better. And maybe they do. JCPenney says it is devoting the efforts of 300 people to overhaul its jcpenney.com site. “I'm an old retailer,” said a company executive vp, “and I don't recall ever working this hard at retail.” Hmmmm. Maybe he should have. No doubt he will in the Allen Questrom regime.