"They think it's better late than never." That said, she thinks companies that haven't quite worked out the kinks are wise to take the time they need. It's better to be late than to put something up that damages the image the company's built in its other stores. National Record Mart could have been on the Internet in November, said Stephenson. But he wants the site to be as fast and user-friendly as possible for both teens in search of the latest from NSync and for store owners interested in making bulk trades of CDs. Among other things, the site will allow individual buyers to choose from more than 28,000 songs to create their own CDs on a song-by-song basis. The resulting mix could be either manufactured in disc form or simply downloaded by the customer. In addition, the National Record Mart's sophisticated system is expected to venture into new territory for online music retailers. It will use uniform pricing codes to build a database that can create a sort of commodities market for the music industry. For example, a retailer with 1,000 extra copies of Garth Brooks' latest might post that inventory on the site for resale to other stores. National Record Mart would collect a service fee. Analyst Roger W. Porter, with Branch, Cabell, is excited about the potential in that idea. "There's some real sizzle to that," he said. While he's disappointed that National Record Mart is missing the early Christmas retail rush, he believes getting the bugs out of the system will be worth it in the long run. Even the largest companies can be tripped up by technical difficulties. Yesterday, the popular ebay.com online auction site was shut down for several hours by a computer problem. And online news services last week were reporting the Toys "R" Us site closed up shop for a few hours last Wednesday. In that case, the system was overloaded by the large volume of users. "I hope I don't have that problem but I hope I get close to that problem," said Stephenson, with a laugh.
(c) 1998, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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