Lycos readying e-commerce
play
Lining up partners, ad money for shopping site
By Steve Gelsi, CBS MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:59 PM ET May 5, 1999
Net stocks
Internet Economy
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Lycos will launch a
major e-commerce Web site this fall aimed at offering a
one-stop destination for shopping, a marketing executive
for the Web portal said Wednesday.
Lycos (LCOS: news, msgs) will support the
yet-to-be-named destination with a multi-million dollar
advertising campaign, said Jan Horsfall, who heads up
marketing for the portal.
"There's a gold vein sitting out there
for a company to build a destination
site for shopping," Horsfall told online
ad pros at the AdTech conference. "It's
wide open, but the window will slam
shut pretty soon."
Horsfall said Lycos' commerce
strategy to launch a separate brand for
shopping differs from rival Yahoo,
which groups all of its stores under the
Yahoo umbrella. Earlier this week,
Yahoo officials said they're mulling a
TV ad campaign behind their
e-commerce capabilities. See related
story.
The objective at Lycos is to offer "the power of one,"
Horsfall said -- providing shoppers with one place to
leave their credit card information and other vital stats.
No other Web sites have the vast
audience that Lycos draws through its
portal service; most commerce sites
cater to vertical categories: books,
music, software. An online mall
doesn't quite exist yet.
Wal-Mart, a booming monolith in the
brick-and-mortar world of retailing,
barely captures 1 percent of the online
audience, he said.
Lycos is lining up e-commerce
partners, both on a local and regional
level, to add to the service. It's
negotiating to get access to
transactional data on consumer
purchases to grow its online marketing
database.
Horsfall said he'd love it if Lycos
would do a deal with Wal-Mart to
boost its e-commerce presence, but he
didn't say if the two were in
discussions.
He predicted that by the holiday shopping season later
this year, a major, general-interest shopping Web site
will emerge.
Horfall's comment on e-commerce followed in the vein
of Lycos' pitch on the category in its merger
announcement earlier this year with USA Networks.
Lycos will get the back-end 800 number infrastructure
of USA's Home Shopping Network, plus the added
commerce offerings and local listings of TicketMaster
Online CitySearch.
Steve Gelsi is a reporter for CBS MarketWatch.
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