The Infinite Aisle
Written by Nuri Djavit
We all have some sense of the extent online research for product purchases and recent research in the US shows that 6/10 people make the internet their first choice for research items ultimately purchased in the brick-and-mortar-store. More an dmore retailers, therefore, are eliminating web-exclusive prices or extending them to instore pricing.
Some stores such as Staples, are offering kiosks where shoppers can peruse their websites and garner product information and reviews. The opportunity this offers is an ‘infinite aisle’, where shoppers are exposed to the stores full inventory regardless of what the store might currently have n stock. In response to this, it’s interesting to note that loss of sales to competitors due to stockouts measures $93 billion in 2008. Two reasons to have kiosks in store: 1) offer more information and empower your customers and 2) avoid losing customers.
The question this beckons is whether response policies, particularly regarding shipping and handling, need to be in place to ensure that custom is not lost, even with the ‘infinite aisle’ and, perhaps perhaps more importantly, whether retailers should consider how their website are planned and designed to allow easy or even seamless transition to an in-store kiosk application environment. The users extended cognitive architecture is completely different in this situation and as we research the psychographics as part of determining site strategy, instore browsing and researching probably should be properly taken into account.
