Stores Magazine - October 2007 - (Page F10) 13 LandsEnd.com 8 Overstock.com program is expanding rapidly. So what do consumers mean, exactly, Five of the remaining top 10 are the onwhen they say they shop at a search enline operations of major chains: Best Buy, gine? We may be seeing the rise of what eBay.com 10% JCPenney, Target, Kohl’s and Sears. are being called “virtual malls” — home JCPenney.com 8.0 Their presence on the list is a testimonial bases for shopping in a variety of retail to the way large traditional retailers are outlets, the way traditional stores are WalMart.com 7.7 flexing their multi-channel muscles. collected in malls. Amazon.com 5.0 They understand the importance of inteA lot of high school and college-age grating online sales and service with the people — a not unimportant demoKohls.com 4.8 rest of the organization, and are finding graphic to the retail community – “hang OldNavy.com 3.5 effective ways to do it. out” in sites like Myspace the way their One of the exceptions is No. 8 Overparents used to hang out at the mall. It’s LandsEnd.com 3.2 stock.com, a blend of some of the attribentirely possible that these virtual mall LLBean.com 2.9 utes of Amazon and eBay. Like Amazon, rats will, if they haven’t already, become Overstock.com is a pure e-tailer with a comfortable bouncing back and forth Target.com 2.6 wide variety of merchandise; like eBay, it between, say, Myspace and Amazon or LaneBryant.com 2.1 runs a busy auction site. The company’s eBay, and in telling their online buddies primary specialty is, as the name implies, Chart data: BIGresearch/STORES what cool things they’ve encountered at serving as a channel for discontinued and over-manufaca particular site. If this occurs — and if retailers want to tured merchandise, which it offers at substantial discounts. benefit from this interaction — one of their priorities is The greatest anomaly, however, is No. 9 Google, which going to have to be getting noticed by the crowd. isn’t a retailer at all but a search engine. In fact, four of the And this doesn’t apply solely to retailers that target Favorite 50 e-commerce sites are search engines, indicating younger consumers. As online browsing and pre-purchase that these websites are and will continue to be prominent research become ever-more-important aspects of shopper features on the online retailing landscape. Google had the behavior, retailers’ approach to the Internet will have to hottest IPO in recent memory when it went public three evolve to keep up with it. years ago, and its stock price is still in the stratosphere. Another interesting trend within the Favorite 50 is the Unlike many of the victims of the great dot-com meltpresence of special-size apparel retailers, names like Lane down, Google is a solid business. It sells ads in two ways — Bryant (and sister site Woman Within), Roamans and King on its site through keywords and across a network of some Size Direct. One reason these retailers thrive online is that 200,000 affiliated websites — and it sells a lot of them: 2006 people who are fit-challenged have issues with walking sales were $10.6 billion, with net income of 29 percent. into a store and being categorized, perhaps unkindly. In the F10 STORES / OCTOBER 2007 WWW.STORES.ORG WHAT WEBSITE DO YOU SHOP AT MOST OFTEN FOR APPAREL ITEMS? http://LandsEnd.com http://Overstock.com http://eBay.com http://JCPenney.com http://WalMart.com http://Amazon.com http://Kohls.com http://OldNavy.com http://LandsEnd.com http://LLBean.com http://Overstock.com http://Target.com http://LaneBryant.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG
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