Yet it's the giant TV sets that are one of the company's biggest holiday sellers. Last year, the company shipped 50 to 100 sets per week during the holiday rush. Unfortunately, too many of them were subsequently returned because of damages that occurred during shipping. The costs of the returns, says Rivera, slashed nearly half the profits off each TV set that was sold. That resulted in not only highly agitated customers, but also the guaranteed loss of future business from big-ticket buyers, Rivera says.
People come back to buy higher-ticket items as their confidence increases.
But according to the results of postholiday surveys, most customers won't ever come back, which means not only the loss of the customer, but also the loss of all the money spent on marketing and advertising to acquire them in the first place. Nationstreet doesn't just deliver a big-screen TV to a customer's doorstep. With Nationstreet as Etronics' carrier, customers can also track the progress of their shipments on the Web. By the time this year's holiday shopping begins in earnest, that tracking capability will be made seamless, enabling customers to retrieve their shipping data without ever leaving the Etronics Web site, says Rivera. If you can't deliver product to customers' expectations, it doesn't matter if you have three-dimensional, rotating products, alternate colors and live chat rooms on your Web site.