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Non-Tech : CompUSA (CPU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hank who wrote (1626)	3/12/1999 1:31:00 PM
From: Tradelite	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3187

Here's a story that might be interesting to some of you--particularly the last several paragraphs. This is from infoworld.com ___________________________ March 8, 1999 Staples.com enhances retail business online By Jessica Davis With one foot still in its huge brick-and-mortar retail chain of office supply stores, Staples stuck a tentative toe into the ocean of electronic-commerce companies last fall, launching its own e-commerce site aimed at small and midsize businesses. Just a few months later, the company took the full plunge spinning off Staples.com as a separate business unit under the watchful eyes of Jeffrey Levitan, vice president, and Michael Ragunas, director of strategic technology and systems architecture. The goal was to offer customers the convenience of online shopping while building awareness of its network of stores. "We started from the ground up when we were building Staples.com," Ragunas says. "We had a mandate to put something together that would showcase the Staples brand and provide a world-class shopping experience. We didn't have expertise in-house around building such a system so we reached outside to third-party organizations for help." One of the sources they tapped was Fry Multimedia, behind such Web sites as Talbots, Eddie Bauer, and 1-800-FLOWERS. TVisions, a company with experience building the hooks from Web front ends into back-end systems helped Staples build its product database in Microsoft's SQL Server hooked to an AS/400 system. "We also had a third party doing quality-assurance work for us, which enabled us to get off the ground very quickly," Ragunas says. The Web development team also leveraged Staples' strong relationship with Microsoft to get "get functionality out of the box." In addition to its SQL Server, Staples.com uses Microsoft's Site Server 3.0 running on Intel servers with network connections to host systems and call-center systems. For competitive reasons, Staples.com executives would not divulge the number of servers the site actually is using now, except to say "several." The site is hosted externally at an ISP that "is on the Internet backbone," Ragunas says. "We made that choice so that we could get the appropriate level of network bandwidth. We get high levels of performance and we have engineered the site to support 1,000 concurrent users." At the beginning of the project, Ragunas counted three to five people on a part-time basis making up his IT team. Now he has eight to 10 people full time. Although Ragunas and Levitan would not say how many hits the site has gotten or how many transactions it has performed, they did say Staples.com's financial performance was exceeding expectations in the tight market of office-supply superstores. "Scrappiness defines the character of the industry," Levitan says. Staples.com is also leveraging technology to provide customers with additional services. For example, the site offers special features. Personalized shopping lists save the customer the job of creating a new list for each "trip" to the store. Self-activated e-mail reminds customers to reorder supplies. To maintain that technological customer-service edge, Staples.com must constantly look at what is next. "Being in the 'dot com' business is like living in a house going through a constant remodel," Levitan says. "There is a constant stream of innovation. We've revised the site once already since the November launch." And Staples.com is currently planning the second, third, and fourth iterations of the site. "It's important for us to keep the site fresh and to offer new functions all the time," Ragunas says. Those are benefits that brick-and-mortar-only stores cannot offer. However, Levitan believes that traditional retailers are not really threatened by the advent of online retail. "Traditional stores are doing just fine," Levitan says. "What's weird right now is how the markets are valuing the various enterprises. They are not giving the brick-and-mortar stores credit for what they are doing." Staples, however, has found that it is best to have a foot in each of these retail worlds. In addition to the technological benefits, Staples.com is offering something that virtual-only stores cannot. Customers who buy products through the Web site can return those products to the brick-and-mortar stores. "It's a different, but better, value proposition than Internet-only," Levitan says. "We think it's the best of both worlds." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------