Most of us still make most of our purchases the old-fashioned way: We go to the store, find what we want, wait patiently in line to plunk down our cash or credit card, and bring home the goods. However, consumers now have a broad array of alternatives, including mailorder, television, phone, and online shopping. People are increasingly avoiding the hassles and crowds at malls by doing more of their shopping by phone or computer. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 17, direct and online marketing are now the fastest-growing forms of marketing.

Only a few years ago, prospects for online retailing were soaring. As more and more consumers flocked to the Web, some experts even saw a day when consumers would bypass stodgy “old economy” store retailers and do almost all of their shopping via the Internet. However, the dot-com meltdown of 2000 dashed these overblown expectations. Many once-brash Web sellers crashed and burned and expectations reversed almost overnight. The experts began to predict that online retailing was destined to be little more than a tag-on to in-store retailing.

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However, today’s online retailing is alive and thriving. With easier-to-use and more-enticing Web sites, improved online service, and the increasing sophistication of search technologies, online business is booming. In fact, although it currently accounts for only a small percentage of retail sales, in some countries, online buying is growing at a much brisker pace than retail buying as a whole.21

Retailer online sites also influence a large amount of in-store buying. Here are some surprising statistics: 69 percent of shoppers research products online before going to a store to make a purchase; 62 percent have looked at least once at online peer reviews before making a purchase; and 39 percent have compared a product’s features and price across retail outlets online before buying.22 So it’s no longer a matter of customers deciding to shop in the store or to shop online. Increasingly, customers are merging store and online outlets into a single shopping process.

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All types of retailers now employ direct and online channels. The online sales of large brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Sears, Staples, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy, are increasing rapidly. Several large online-only retailers—Amazon.com, online auction site eBay, online travel companies such as Travelocity.com and Expedia.com, and others—are now making it big on the Web. At the other extreme, hordes of niche marketers are using the Web to reach new markets and expand their sales. Today’s more-sophisticated search engines (Google, Baidu) and comparison-shopping sites (Shopping.com, Buy.com, Shopzilla.com, and others) put almost any online retailer within a mouse click or two’s reach of millions of customers.

Still, much of the anticipated growth in online sales will go to multichannel retailers— the click-and-brick marketers who can successfully merge the virtual and physical worlds. In a recent ranking of the top 500 online retail sites, 55 percent were multichannel retailers.23 A For example, consider Macy’s, the largest department store chain in the United States:24

Macy’s is beefing up its online and direct-to-consumer channel to complement its more than 800 Macy’s stores around the country. The retailer’s new feature-rich Web site offers a bigger merchandise selection, backed by two big new high-tech distribution facilities that ensure faster delivery. But the Web site aims to do more than just sell products online. “We see Macys.com as far more than a selling site,” says Peter Sachse, chairman of Macys.com. “We see it as the online hub of the Macy’s brand.” While some customers make purchases online, the site offers a range of features—from customer reviews and side-by-side item comparisons to listings of in-store events and credit card bill payment—designed to build loyalty to Macy’s and to pull customers

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Online retailing: Macy’s feature-rich Web site does more than just sell products online. It serves as “the online hub of the Macy’s brand” and pulls customers into stores.

Continue reading here: The Rise of Megaretailers

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