This is a pretty good read:
Dot-coms Dominate Click-and-mortar Toy Sellers - Survey 05/26/00
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, U.S.A. 2000 MAY 26 (Newsbytes) -- By Kevin Featherly, Newsbytes. Click-and-mortar retailers - the ones operating affiliated brick-and-mortar stores as well as Web site - are not dismantling the dominance of born-on-the-Web merchants, if a survey of online toy and games sales is to be believed.
Forrester Research, a Web-analysis firm in Cambridge, Mass., this week released its latest Power Rankings survey, this time of toy sellers. That survey places Amazon.com at the top of the toy-selling charts, followed closely by fellow Web-only merchants Smarterkids.com and EToys. On a 100-point scale, the sites all finished with a Power Ranking between Amazon's high of 70.76 and EToys' 69.04.
Buy.com, another pure-play Web retailer, finished fourth with a ranking of 64.01, while click-and-mortars KBKids.com, Toys'R'Us, WalMart and J.C. Penney followed. J.C. Penney's ranking of 58.57 was the lowest of the pack. The numbers, based on a 100-point scale, are the sum of consumer rankings in six categories, ranging from product costs to customer service.
"I think it's an indication that it's pretty hard to create a compelling online shopping experience," said Tom Rhinelander, a senior Forrester analyst who helped compile the data from surveys in recent months of 19,000 consumers, all of whom are taking part in Greenfield Online panels that are being used to determine Forrester's Power Rankings. Forrester also had analysts making purchases, but gave consumer responses more weight in the final scores, Rhinelander said.
He said that all of the click-and-mortar companies in the survey have realized the necessity of getting online to compete with their Web-only competitors. But there's a difference between figuring that out the importance of putting up a Web site, and committing to operating one well.
"I think they've all made the decision that they have to be here and they've all initially put up their sites," he said. "But I think that step ... is the hardest part - to at least gain parity with the born-on-the-Web folks and, from their standpoint, to hopefully surpass them."
That's not happening yet, however, the rankings indicate. And that's true despite expectations in some corners that click-and-mortar companies would by now begin to encroach on Web-only retail's dominance.
One of the key reasons for that failing, according to Rhinelander, is because click-and-mortars have yet to leverage the assets they already possess - their physical store locations - by integrating them with what they offer online.
"If you look at the clicks-and-mortars, one of the things they need to exploit is kind of the ability to integrate the two," the analyst said. "Why not provide a terminal or kiosk in (store) aisles so that if somebody is looking at the toy in the real world, they can get access to the (product) reviews at that same time?"
Few companies, aside from discount retailer Kmart through its unfolding BlueLight.com effort, are doing that now, Rhinelander noted. "Everybody's talked about integration, but everybody's talked about creating compelling Web sites for some time," he said. "It's very different to talk about it and to actually come through."
However, the Power Rankings focused on the actual online experience of using the sites themselves. And there, the survey indicates, click-and-mortars are seriously failing to compete.
"You can pretty much say in general that the born-on-the-Web folks do this stuff better than the clicks-and-mortar folks," Rhinelander said. "But there are examples where the folks who didn't finish overall well in the Power Rankings finished better in an individual category."
For example, the online retailer Buy.com - which only sells video games and not toys per se - finished ahead of the pack in terms of pricing. If lowest price were a shopper's only consideration, Rhinelander said, they'd do well to stick to this site.
However, Buy.com has some problems that resulted in a middle-of-the-pack overall ranking. It does not maintain real-time inventory information on its site. There are no basic convenience features like an address book or gift-wrapping. And, as one consumer stated in commentary gathered during the survey, the site said that something the consumer purchased would be shipped, but in reality the company did not have enough of the product in stock to deliver on the promise.
"They're just missing a lot of features," Rhinelander said.
But that site ranked high above the lowest-ranking site, J.C. Penney. A Forrester analyst who tried to make a purchase from the site reported a difficult experience there. "It's hard work shopping online for toys at J.C. Penney," the analyst wrote. "Pop-up menus cascading across the screen make navigation difficult; a tedious online e-mail form demands users enter their full mailing address - no matter what the inquiry. Delivery was a wash: Shipping prices were low, but our video game arrived in an unprotected plastic bag."
Amazon, on the other hand, was at least respectable in all categories, finishing first in the categories of customer service, delivery and site features, while finishing either second or third in the remaining categories of cost, transaction processing and site usability.
"They don't do everything perfectly," Rhinelander said of Amazon. "But they do most things right. And most sites can't compete in terms of the breadth of what they offer."
In coming weeks, Forrester plans to release results of other Power Rankings categories, including apparel, brokerages, computing, flowers and health. |
