2 ms·

I worked at a Barne's & Noble book store in college right as Amazon took off. I think BN's model for doing online was pretty common, which was that they set it

I worked at a Barne's & Noble book store in college right as Amazon took off. I think BN's model for doing online was pretty common, which was that they set it up as a separate business that they made compete with their retail outlets. If you went into a store that didn't have the book you were looking for, the last thing the store wanted you to do was to go home and order it online from the BN website. They pushed you to get it shipped to the store, the. Wait for a phone call to tell you it arrived so you could come back and buy it. Then the store got the revenue towards it's sales goals. One of many problems was that most people never actually came back to get the book when it arrived, and salespeople either didn't mention or actively discouraged buying on the web site, so the sale was lost completely. On the other side, their online wasn't integrated into their brick & mortar locations until way too late to claw back from Amazon. I'm not sure when they finally added the ability to see if a local store had a copy of the book you wanted, but it took too long because of the internal competition, and you still pretty much needed to call the store and make sure they had a copy because you could easily waste a trip if the inventory wasn't up to date or no one could find the book. Doing a bad job of adding online to their business ended up making the entire experience worse. Many retail chains seem to have done the same thing in the early days if trying to have an online presence. Heck, you still can't reserve or pre-buy a game at a physical using their web site, which says it's in stock. And you'll often still waste a trip if you trust the website and don't call ahead.

reaperducer 5y ago
they set it up as a separate business that they made compete with their retail outlets. Sadly, this is very common in retail, and one of the things that is destroying brick-and-mortar. My wife works in this space and tells me that a lot of retailers, from department stores to fancy boutiques, do this. The worst part is that since the online store is generally located in the warehouse, it gets first dibs on stock, while the stores have to do without. Some of the retail stores she works with will lose out on $20k/day because they can't get stock, but online always has it. The managers are training the customers to check online first, cannibalizing their own employees and stores. Then they send the daily reports to the stores with notes like, "I see that online did 44% better than your store in your zone today." Well, no shit. Online has stock and the boutiques don't. Sometimes the boutiques do a little fighting back, and sort of "pool" their stock. Meaning that if a store doesn't have something a customer wants, the employees of that store will call another store they reciprocate with and try to have the item shipped to the customer from that store for free. The just-above-minimum-wage shopgirl ends up eating the shipping just so she can make her unrealistic sales goal and stay employed for another month.

reaperducer 5y ago

they set it up as a separate business that they made compete with their retail outlets. Sadly, this is very common in retail, and one of the things that is destroying brick-and-mortar. My wife works in this space and tells me that a lot of retailers, from department stores to fancy boutiques, do this. The worst part is that since the online store is generally located in the warehouse, it gets first dibs on stock, while the stores have to do without. Some of the retail stores she works with will lose out on $20k/day because they can't get stock, but online always has it. The managers are training the customers to check online first, cannibalizing their own employees and stores. Then they send the daily reports to the stores with notes like, "I see that online did 44% better than your store in your zone today." Well, no shit. Online has stock and the boutiques don't. Sometimes the boutiques do a little fighting back, and sort of "pool" their stock. Meaning that if a store doesn't have something a customer wants, the employees of that store will call another store they reciprocate with and try to have the item shipped to the customer from that store for free. The just-above-minimum-wage shopgirl ends up eating the shipping just so she can make her unrealistic sales goal and stay employed for another month.