More on the (Local) Shopping Front

Two pieces that were released recently are worth noting…

The New York Times writes about Wal-Mart the growing trend of buy online and pick up in store. (Nearby Now does “reserve online” and pick up in store.) From the article:

Take Wal-Mart, for instance. In recent weeks, the company, the largest retailer, completed a national introduction of its Site to Store service — in which consumers buy items from the Web site, then have the items delivered, at no charge, to their local Wal-Mart stores where they can pick them up. Items arrive within days, though the system is not yet set up to tell customers when something they want is already in stock at a local store.

According to Raul Vazquez, Walmart.com’s chief executive, the initiative has surpassed the company’s expectations, with about a third of all online sales occurring through this program. “It’s gone incredibly well,” Mr. Vazquez said. “None of us expected to see it reach this percentage of sales at this point.”

This type of program, which is increasingly common, is an interesting hybrid of e-commerce and local shopping. It still qualifies as local because it involves physical stores, local overhead and so on. The key here is the back end systems that allow real-time inventory data to be presented online. As that becomes more prevalent (and it is), you’ll see more online “shopping” offline conversion/purchase behavior — not more e-commerce.

Simultaneously iCrossing has released its “How America Searches — Online Retail” report. The report has lots of interesting data and information I’ve been meaning to dig into. From my superficial review of the data so far, the report is really about the Internet’s influence on consumer purchase behavior in myriad ways rather than e-commerce per se.

I don’t have time to further explore right now, but one interesting piece of data that caught my eye was the use of search to find local/offline stores to buy products. See the far right column in the chart (click to enlarge):

Source: iCrossing (9/07)