E-commerce business model strategies today have taken odd turns from a straightaway course set by brick and mortar retailers who port their inventory online. Or the dot-com who remains a pure play with perhaps some physical fulfillment capability. Two retailers have put an entirely new spin on merging the virtual and the actual, which makes us wonder if we might see more rather than less of this as the act of selling remains a cutthroat business proposition.
Special orders are time consuming to fulfill and more costly for retailers to handle.
By plugging in these terminals to its remote data center, the company allows customers to inquire about a book's availability and order as if they were visiting the Web site. Alternatively, one dot-com went live at the same time it opened for business on leased store space. So our original approach was to go after both equally-using the Web to drive traffic into the stores and using the stores to drive traffic to the Web. It's been a rocket ship to the moon in terms of people being very satisfied. The kiosks are Windows CE thin client terminals that host an in-house Web application.