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Letter to the editor

Online sellers' mission: Evolve or perish

Teens aren't sitting in front of PCs, and online stores know it.

By MARK ALBRIGHT, Times Staff Writer
Published January 24, 2008

ORLANDO - The bright spot in retailers' otherwise sullen holiday season, the online shopping industry can ill afford to rest on its laurels.

Teens spend more time text messaging than killing time on desktop computers. They regard e-mail as something their parents do. Meanwhile, the cell phone in a few years will morph into a wireless point-and-click computer armed for comparison shopping and buying inside stores.

During the two-month holiday season, online merchandise sales soared 20 percent. That was seven times the dismal 3 percent sales gain of the entire store-based industry. But when executives of 400 of the largest online sites ranging from Amazon.com to Zappos.com gathered in Orlando for the winter conference of their trade group, Shop.org, talk zeroed in on what's next in a fast-changing industry.

"Customers are not sitting in front of a PC as much, and computers are soon going to be everywhere," said Doug Mack, a vice president with software giant Adobe. "So online retailers must create an experience beyond a simple Web site that replicates the store. Movies can make me cry. But frankly, I haven't had an emotional online shopping experience since my last complaint about free shipping."

With only about 15 percent of their revenue supporting improvements, executives are confronted with a bewildering set of potential places to invest.

Already, winds of change are visible. Web sites run by QVC and HSN now carry streaming video on demand of product demonstrations, a feature that is going to become commonplace as sites cater to the YouTube generation..

Internet shopping attention has shifted to several areas:

•Tapping Facebook-type sites:Exploiting the growing number of social-networking sites to save big money on advertising by capturing word of mouth, buzz and easy links back to their shopping sites - all for the cost of a cool downloadable widget.

It could be a dancing elf that 6-million shoppers downloaded and forwarded to share with friends during the holidays. Or it could be an automatic link to post your personal shopping list from BlueNile.com on your Facebook page.

•Online feedback: Customer reviews may be anonymous. But more people trust them than critics who put their name on their opinions. That's because there are so many reviews now 400,000 on QVC.com, for instance that randomly browsing a bunch of them gives shoppers a feel for product quality, how it works and whether the experience is worth the expense.

•Customized shopping: Product sales features now can be downloaded to desktops or Web sites from such sites as Woot, Meebo and Kaboodle. One widget site called Lemonade enables people to create their own lemonade stand that they can fill with shopping site products they personally recommend. Some sites will pay them a commission for referrals that turn into sales.

•Virtual-world selling: Commerce is tapping the growth of alternative life sites that enable users to create avatars that roam imaginary virtual worlds online. Revenues generated from advertising, product sales and access codes to play generated $1.5-billion in 2007. Webkinz for children, Disney's Club Penguin and Second Life for teens and up are the big ones. Build-a-Bear Workshop opened one last month. Customers buy a plush toy at stores that contains an access code to play with the bear in an online world.

•Selling via cellular: Tactics to make shopping sites and e-mail more friendly with text messaging-sized screens. Research found that 27 percent of online shoppers communicate mainly through text messaging.

"They are virtually all in the 16-to-35 age group," said David Daniels, research director at Jupiter Research.

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8252.

How online shopping is spreading

- Tapping social-networking sites

- Encouraging lots of online feedback on products and Web sites

- Customizing shopping experiences with downloads

- Selling goods for real money in virtual worlds

- Reaching more customers via cell phones

[Last modified January 23, 2008, 23:07:38]