EGGS' "value-add", or intended "value-add", is customer service
Anax, you mentioned this earlier, apparently agreeing with Orban that this is niche for EGGS relative to competitors. I could be wrong but I hear that term a little differently. To me "customer service" connotes "complaint department" and "people-to-people" interaction...not insignificant matters but essentially analog world concerns. Here I think it is telling that Orban's previous success was in b-'n-m discount store retailing. For all the benefits of price, expanded inventory and lower cost selling, the problem for "warehouse" retailing is that customers get lost among the mammoth displays with no one to facilitate shopping decisions. They get "product overload" (personally I find it mentally much more wearing to shop in a warehouse than a smaller store. I think that's a common experience but still we do it for the options and price). Naturally a good warehouse retailer must deal with that condition to overcome the customer lethergy it produces. They must have good customer service! (i.e. Home Depot is probably the best at this).
Now, of course every (e-)retailer, must have good customer service...allowing customers to quickly understand the products/services offered, place orders and received goods quickly, etc. but in sucessful digital retailing, IMO, that is foremost a software problem, not an analog problem. Handling it as a people-to-people matter only adds costs in place of those offset by a virtual space location. Ironically, in cyberspace, as AMZN constantly trumpets, inventory can be far bigger than can be held in a warehouse bricks-n-morter store, yet we are not confronted physically (and psychologically) with that huge inventory. We don't suffer the same kind of product overload as in an analog setting. We see the options and complexity of services in simplicity of hyperlinks rather than 3 dimensional massiveness...(which is why I consider customer service to be a software problem -- AMZN handles it beautifully, in my experience, without any special emphasis or claim to uniqueness). With good software, we don't need a "live" person (only virtual people) to help us shop.
So I guess my bottomline here is a confirmation of the apparent believe among internet investment analysts that even though EGGS has abandoned the analog world of retailing it is still not truely an internet company. The conceptual baggage (stated emphasis on customer service being an example) is embedded in management ideology. Unless that changes, I don't think EGGS will be a virtual survivor. |
