The temperature is consistently below the 70s, baseball's regular season is completed and fresh sweet corn is harder to find every day. You guessed it, the holiday shopping season is about to begin. A year ago, we all expected the the World Wide Web to be the fashionable place to shop for the technologically savvy. Sure enough, Internet purchases soared. So the folks who graph these things might be inclined to put an arrow at the end of last year's sales figures and assume Internet sales will be going through the roof.
Consumers are smarter than that.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has something it calls the E-Retail Intelligence System that surveys about 500 Web consumers every month. It amounts to advice that retailers use the Web, stores and even catalogs to compete in the New Economy. Then you go to the Web to buy it for a better price. The consumer read a list of product features, maybe a review and a price listing on the Web and jumped into a car to buy it at a store. Shoppers' preferences So now retailers need a store, a catalog AND a Web site to make all the shoppers happy.