ECOMMERCE
"Don't use that word - mall is death to these people," says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. The conversation turned on the late-autumn flood of PR concerning online shopping: virtual wallets, affiliate networks, and rewards programs, not to mention the holiday hype from folks such as Buy.com and AOL. At the height of the flood, 1999 loomed on the horizon like 1995 all over again. And ecommerciers all but agree that 1999 will be 1995 all over again - except with critical mass. There's less consensus, however, on what form 1999's Way-New Mall will take.
"The first time round, the start-ups got it exactly backward," says August Capital's Andrew Anker of the link-rotted catalogues that are now so much I-way roadkill. "They aggregated merchants like a physical mall, instead of customers."
So how do you aggregate customers? Not surprisingly, FreeShop CEO Tim Choate, W3 Networks president Steve Bonneau, and Steve Tomlin, head of AOL's PersonaLogic, each believe their comparative shopping services will set the new standard. FreeShop, a "vertical portal for shopping," offers samples, discounts, and other incentives for sticking with the service; W3 Networks touts ease-of-use with its 3,000 affiliated URLs; and PersonaLogic is an "interactive buying guide" with detailed product information. "Most people," Tomlin says, "want more than simply the lowest price. They want to know vendor reliability, delivery speed, value-added services." PersonaLogic and such competitors as CompareNet, he says, focus not just on price, but on selection.
Which of these approaches will dominate? Only the Shadow knows. After all, it's been only four years. It was 61 years before the first planned shopping center, in Dallas, evolved into the 4.2 million-square-foot Mall of America, in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, given the quick in-and-out, point-and-click shopping afforded online, a few wiseacres have already quipped that the Web is already the mall to end all malls.
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