Slipping along the cutting edge of retail technology can be dangerous to your projects health. As the new channels of retail distribution grow so to will the stakes and risks involved. Often , that which we already know applies perfectly well to the new channels of distribution now widely available. And for those areas where we lack expertise, we can gain the knowledge from experienced individuals and from trial and error. But most of traditional retail and consumer behaviour s body of knowledge can be successfully applied to the world of cyberselling on the Internet or other interactive retail and commerce applications.
Lets take a web site as a comparative example to a grocery store.
Your web site has a schematic which explains the navigation towards points of interest. The grocery store has an architectural layout. The store has gondolas also known as shelves which display from 30-50,000 products. The web site has icons and buttons, toolbars, graphics, animation, text, audio and stream video. Each has a point of entry, traffic routes and a point of exit.