E-Tailers Try New Holiday Tricks

Darcey Howard needed an idea. The Seattle image consultant wanted to find a

business gift she could give clients-something stylish, yet appropriate for

more than one person. So she went to Judysbook.com, a social-networking site

that lets people stay in touch with friends or business associates, and asked

for input from the members of her network, mostly other marketing pros. They

recommended the Dangle, a $35 portable handbag holder that sits on a tabletop,

letting women avoid plopping their Coach and Gucci bags on the floor. Howard was

sold-on the Dangle and on using the Net for smarter shopping. "You can

spend a lot of time there, reading things and finding stuff," she says.

It's not only a merry Christmas on the Web this year, it's

also an innovative one. Forrester Research says that online retail sales this

holiday will surge 25%, to $18 bn. The increasingly strong profitability of Net

commerce is giving retailers the chance to experiment with a stockingful of new

sales and marketing tactics. They're tapping into technologies such as blogs,

social networking, and wireless phones to draw shoppers to their sites.

"There are a host of new ways to reach out that are more innovative,"

says Forrester analyst, Carrie Johnson.

The experiments are coming from startups to Web giants alike.

Yahoo! is testing Shoposphere, a networking site within Yahoo! Shopping that

offers thousands of reviews, blogs, and shopping lists generated by members. Rob

Solomon, a vice-president at Yahoo! Shopping, says relying on users lets Yahoo

serve markets too small to command space on its front pages.

Sometimes the experiments aren't about closing sales online

but about finding new ways to market to harried holiday shoppers. Blog

DailyCandy.com offers fashion and beauty tips to the young and hip in eight

cities. This fall it launched a newsletter alerting members to deals in their

areas. Now companies from Apple Computer to Levi Strauss, are lining up to be

included in the online mailing, offering DailyCandy members discounts of up to

25%.

Perhaps the biggest potential lies in ventures that want to

tie e-commerce to local commerce, which still accounts for about 95% of retail

sales. Drawing most of the attention is Google Base, a database service from

Google that lets people and businesses advertise almost any product or service

in a city or region. Already, 14.5 mn products are listed on Google Base.

Shop Around the Corner



The search giant is but one of many players in the field,

however. Startup Cairo.com rounds up local advertising circulars and puts them

online to let shoppers know which physical stores in their area offer the best

sales. ShopLocal LLC has the same sort of circular information on its site, plus

what it claims is the first service for comparing prices at online retailers

with those of local merchants. ShopLocal's chief marketing officer, Dave Hamel

says the site has prices from as many as 700 local stores in some cities.

New York's GPShopper, with its S'Lifter service, has

attracted attention from retailers as large as Foot Locker S'Lifter lets

people use their cell phones to compare prices at nearby stores and get notices

of local sales. By next year, the company plans to let consumers fill out wish

lists, then use satellite technology to flag them when they walk past a store

that has one of the items on sale. "We want to find out how many of these

places are being used by our customers," says Raul Vasquez, vice-president

for marketing at Wal-Mart.com. "We'll work with several of them."

No one pretends to know how much business the new

technologies can help Web merchants capture. Still, the experimentation this

season is striking, after years when what passed for innovation was bigger

pictures of products. The changes are starting small. But if they work, look for

a lot more like them for Christmas 2006 and beyond.

By Timothy J. Mullaney