E-Commerce Gets Smarter
On any given day, somewhere between backpacks and winter socks, a man and a woman who are soon to be married will be roaming the aisles. One will be carrying a handheld device about the size of a cell phone and pointing it at something he or she likes. The device is an infrared reader: push a button, and a laser beam reads the bar code of the targeted item. When the reader is synched with a specially equipped cash register, the item is added, instantly, to the couple’s online REI gift registry. Eric Thorson, operations manager at the store, smiles when he thinks about the couples he’s seen. “We have one scanner per couple, and we’ll have the future wife run upstairs to women’s clothing, and [the groom] wants to be downstairs in the climbing department picking out an ice axe,” he says. “It’s almost like it becomes the ultimate shopping adventure for the two of them rather than thinking about what would be a practical wedding gift.” The scanner can record some 300 items, but, Thorson notes, “I’ve seen scanners come back that we have to upload and send back out because they filled the memory.”
It may seem strange, but those couples traversing the aisles—downloading, uploading, and somehow fusing in-store interactions with website maintenance—are the future of e-commerce. Other retailers provide similar scanners, but the resulting Web registries must be manually updated. REI is one of those making e-commerce far more interactive—automating updates and using the Web to make registries available to all its stores and business channels.
The benefits for REI customers are real. Any customer can view the registry, either at an in-store kiosk or online. And if an item is purchased—whether through mail order, over the phone, on the Internet, or in any of REI’s 77 stores—the list is instantly updated at all those locations. Customers can buy online but decide to pick up or return at a store. Discounts are the same in all locations, and every item offered on the Web can be ordered through the store or catalogue, and vice versa.
The business jargon for this model of integrated retail sales is “multichanneling”—that is, fusing digital services with in-store, mail-order, and telephone sales, and with any other retail channels. The digerati have called it “clicks and mortar” since the Internet boom of the 1990s. No matter the term, it is now the driving force in retail. For while the Internet works fine for some types of goods—such as books, computer products, and music—many shoppers don’t want to purchase and pay shipping costs for things like canoes, cars, clothes, and entertainment systems without trying them out, trying them on, touching them, or maybe even talking to a knowledgeable salesperson.
It may seem strange, but those couples traversing the aisles—downloading, uploading, and somehow fusing in-store interactions with website maintenance—are the future of e-commerce. Other retailers provide similar scanners, but the resulting Web registries must be manually updated. REI is one of those making e-commerce far more interactive—automating updates and using the Web to make registries available to all its stores and business channels.
The benefits for REI customers are real. Any customer can view the registry, either at an in-store kiosk or online. And if an item is purchased—whether through mail order, over the phone, on the Internet, or in any of REI’s 77 stores—the list is instantly updated at all those locations. Customers can buy online but decide to pick up or return at a store. Discounts are the same in all locations, and every item offered on the Web can be ordered through the store or catalogue, and vice versa.
The business jargon for this model of integrated retail sales is “multichanneling”—that is, fusing digital services with in-store, mail-order, and telephone sales, and with any other retail channels. The digerati have called it “clicks and mortar” since the Internet boom of the 1990s. No matter the term, it is now the driving force in retail. For while the Internet works fine for some types of goods—such as books, computer products, and music—many shoppers don’t want to purchase and pay shipping costs for things like canoes, cars, clothes, and entertainment systems without trying them out, trying them on, touching them, or maybe even talking to a knowledgeable salesperson.
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