The New York Times
September 22, 1999
Digital Dressing Rooms and Other New Twists
By PETER H. LEWIS
The Internet has become a giant laboratory for new technologies
intended to bring shoppers and sellers closer together, and
consumers will encounter a much improved environment when they go
shopping online this fall. As befits a marketplace based on
technology, electronic retailers, or E-tailers, as they are known,
are hurling technological solutions against many of the most common
criticisms of Internet commerce.
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Endless Possibilities
As more customers go shopping on the Internet through high-speed
connections at the office, or through new home services, on-line
businesses will be able to deploy multimedia technologies featuring
voice, video or both.
Several years from now, as technology progresses, shoppers will most
likely be able to shop in virtual reality stores, where they will be
immersed in a three-dimensional world, able to roam simulated aisles
looking at products on virtual shelves.
Already, shopping on the Internet is expanding into real-world stores.
Sales kiosks connected to the Internet allow some shops, like Radio
Shack and the Gap, to offer customers access to on-line catalogues
containing far more choices than can fit in the store.
Coupled with new wireless Internet devices, like the 3Com
Corporation's Palm VII handheld computer or the next generation of
Web-enabled mobile phones, these new Internet technologies will
transform shopping. In Finland, for example, consumers can already
point their digital phones at a gasoline pump or vending machine and
then dial an access code to have the purchase billed to their phone
accounts.
"I foresee shoppers walking through Wal-Mart with their connected Palm
Pilots, comparing prices with other stores even as they walk down the
aisles," said Peter Zandan, a founder of an Internet start-up company
called Zilliant that is developing an assortment of smart software
assistants.
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These new technologies -- which include three-dimensional graphics,
interactive customer service using text and voice, new payment
systems, improved search engines and automated shopping agents
called "bots" (for robots) -- are among the many tactics merchants
will be using this year to capture the interest of shoppers.
More important in the long term are the technologies designed to
keep the loyalties of those who have already shopped at a site.
Much of the new online shopping technology will be hidden from
view, including software systems that will enable merchants to
better track the personal spending and shopping habits of
customers, reward frequent shoppers, manage inventory up to the
minute, fill orders quickly and maintain continuing relationships
with customers who, after all, can move to a competing Web site
with a click of a mouse.
Following are examples of some of the new technologies shoppers
will see in the coming holiday season, or before. Some of the
fancier technologies work best with fast Internet connections and
powerful microprocessors, but most are designed to work with any
standard PC and modem.
Virtual shoppers still cannot pick up an item and examine it, but
they can approximate the experience. The Sharper Image
(www.sharperimage.com) has a "3D Enhanced" catalogue online that
enables customers with faster Internet connections and more
powerful processors (Intel's Pentium III and AMD's Athlon chips,
for example) to view images in three dimensions. Digitized images
of many products can be rotated, just by clicking and dragging with
a mouse, allowing them to be examined from any angle. The user can
see the back of the item, for example, zoom in to see specific
details and even manipulate the object to see how its lid opens or
how it folds for storage.
Lands' End (www.landsend.com) allows women to create a "personal
model" on screen that approximates the shopper's physical
proportions. Once the model's dimensions, hair style and skin color
are established from a checklist, the shopper can send the model
into a virtual dressing room to try on clothes from the catalogue.
The model can be rotated to show how the clothes look from all
angles, and the color of the clothes can be changed with a click.
The site even recommends outfits that are flattering to the
customer's body shape.
The rising popularity of the Java software technology is allowing
many sites to offer animated illustrations, which enable the
customer to see, for example, how to assemble that new bicycle.
Apple Computer's Quicktime and Microsoft's Media Player are among
the multimedia tools that enable Web sites to include brief video
clips and soundtracks, making the Web appear more like television
than an electronic advertising brochure.
Collaborative filtering, already used by popular sites like
Amazon.com, is a technology that analyzes customers' buying
patterns and preferences and makes recommendations based on the
buying habits of other consumers with similar profiles. Anyone who
enjoyed reading "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, for example,
can check to see what other books have been popular with people who
were also fans of the novel.
Another related approach, which will be used on many merchant sites
this year, is to add electronic message boards or online community
centers where consumers can compare notes with one another online.
Epinions.com, which will open for business later this year, appears
to be obsessed with giving advice. It not only points consumers to
what it considers the best expert reviews and information resources
on the Web for any given product but also asks, and in some cases
pays, regular consumers to add their own product reviews.
Auction sites, led by Ebay, have become so popular that a new
company called Auctionwatch (www.auctionwatch.com) is bidding to
become the central site where buyers and sellers can come together
to talk about tips and tactics and to share opinions on which
auction sites are good and bad for certain items. Auctionwatch also
plans to give sellers more tools to make it easier to sell items
online.
Consumers are accustomed to buying small, common items like
sweaters, books, and compact disks online but may need more
persuasion to buy larger and more expensive products like
automobiles and furniture.
Microsoft's Carpoint site was among the first to use panoramic,
360-degree digital images to enable online shoppers to examine the
inside of many models. And Furniture.com (www.furniture.com) is
enabling shoppers to arrange and rearrange room layouts on screen,
to see whether that sofa will fit in the living room and whether it
will clash with the fabric on the chairs. The company will even
send fabric swatches through the mail.
Just as giant superstores -- the so-called category killers -- are
gaining in popularity in the bricks-and-mortar world, so too are
they gaining ground in the virtual world. Some sites, like CBS
Sportsline (www.sportsline.com), plan to offer more than 200,000
products by this time next year.
The problem with virtual superstores is that customers get lost
amid hundreds of thousands of products. So several sites have
turned to Ask.com, whose "Ask Jeeves" search engine enables people
to type questions in plain English as opposed to searching for key
words or phrases.
The Ask Jeeves technology is being incorporated into shopping sites
to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.
One is the consumer electronics site E-Town (www.etown.com), which
uses the technology as part of its Interactive Decision Assistant,
a software tool that is intended to guide consumers through the
purchasing process in the same way a good sales clerk would. The
system asks the customer a series of questions, including budget,
and then recommends products.
This may be the breakthrough year for intelligent agents, also
known as bots or spiders. Bots are software programs that act
autonomously on instructions from their masters.
The first bots to gain wide acceptance from consumers came in the
form of comparative shopping services like Bottomdollar.com. At
such sites, the user types in the name of the product and the bots
scurry forth to find the lowest prices available on the Internet,
at least among the selection of stores that permits bots to gather
information.
The next generation of bots, typified by sites like Netsage.com and
Neuromedia.com, will not only be able to scour the Net for nuggets
of information but also to execute simple or complex tasks, such as
finding the lowest cost on a new VCR, buying it and having it
shipped. Netsage's automated assistants -- like the animated paper
clip that offers guidance in Microsoft Word's word processing
software -- will eventually take photorealistic human form.
Many shoppers, and merchants as well, are discovering that the hard
part of E-commerce often comes after the sale. "Retailers still
need to keep their eyes on the basics, things like customer service
and fulfillment, and that's where things get sticky," said Fiona
Swerdlow, a digital commerce analyst with Jupiter Communications in
New York City. "If the product is not delivered on time, if you are
out of stock on an item and your site is still selling it, that's
bad. If you can't provide good customer service, that's very, very
bad. Retailers need to concentrate on the basics before getting
caught up in the whiz-bang stuff."
The next step is to enable customers to talk to service
representatives using the Internet connection, with a microphone
and speakers instead of a telephone. The technology, developed by
Lipstream, is currently demonstrated on Excite's People and Chat
service (www.excite.com/communities/chat/voicechat/). Two or more
people can open a Voice Chat screen and carry on conversations as
they would using walkie-talkies, but without long-distance
telephone charges.
As voice technology proliferates, Internet businesses will enable
customers to click a button on any given Web page to open a voice
link with a service representative. In some cases, sites will offer
a call-back button that lets consumers request that a service
representative call them on the telephone at a certain time.
One of the great marriages in commerce is the instant ordering made
possible by the Internet and overnight delivery made possible by
companies like Federal Express and Airborne Express. Last
Christmas, shoppers discovered on some sites, like the one for the
computer products dealer PC Connection, that they could place an
order by midnight on Dec. 23 and have the item in hand by Christmas
Eve.
Several new companies, including Shipper.com (www.shipper.com), are
experimenting with same-day courier fulfillment, meaning the
customer can place an order and receive it the same day. The
service is currently limited to the Los Angeles and San Francisco
areas, with plans to expand to New York City, Chicago and several
other large cities in 2000.
Will customers be willing to pay for rapid delivery? While some
balk at the "hidden" charges for shipping and handling, others find
it more convenient to pay than to spend the afternoon driving from
store to store looking for an item.
"At first I questioned whether we should even put $1.95 stuff in
our store," said Daniel Head of CBS Sportsline. "What customer is
going to spend $5.95 for shipping and handling for a $1.95 boat
bracket? It turns out the customer was in New York City, and $5.95
was a bargain when you consider the cost of a cab, or parking, and
just the hassle of looking for the part in the city."
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