[Sigia-l] Site to Store - Ship to store

[Ziya Oz]

Kinjal:

> Are we going to see more and more companies adding such feature to their
> sites??

This actually started a long time ago. The first public exposure was during
the Amazon vs. Barnes & Nobel skirmish at the beginning of the brick &
mortar vs. Internet pure-play stores dotcom-era debate. The unbelievably
inept B&N never exploited their stores and was buried by Amazon in short
order.

It's not entirely clear that this is an explosive trend, as the creation and
management costs of order fulfillment is neither cheap nor easy.

Circuit City, for example, guarantees that you can order online and go to a
select store to pick it up in 20 minutes. This isn't trivial on a national
scale. And that's why you're not seeing many such examples.

Some online stores get around this by writing off the cost of merchandise
shipments, in lieu of not having physical stores. At Zappos.com or
SierraTradingPost you can try out shoes and return them; Zappos even pays
for the return shipment.

Also, for all sorts of contractual reasons, the inventory you can find at
online stores can be substantially different from what's available at their
physical stores, making interchangeable ordering, pick up and returns all
the more difficult.

IOW, as an idea this sounds great, but we don't have that many successful
examples around.

-- 
Ziya

It depends.
If it didn't, you'd be out of a job.