10 trends to watch.

By Bill Spaide

Additionally, the operating promise of the Web — new customer support technologies and lower labor costs — might actually be fulfilled.

This isn’t to say that catalogers’ experiences with the Internet were always so positive. At first, fulfillment managers secretly wished the Web would simply go away. What a difference a few years make. With today’s more robust Web sites and users more comfortable with the Internet-shopping experience, catalogers are getting fewer live customer contacts to the point where some (not I) believe phone ordering eventually will go the way of mail orders.