Catalog Executive Panel: Multichannel Customers Reign Supreme

With 45 percent of its orders coming online during the holiday 2004 season, Lillian Vernon is particularly attentive to the rapid channel shift to online buying. “I call it ‘shift happens’,” Shapiro said. “It’s important for us, and everybody, to understand the integration of sales channels.”

Since his days as a consultant to Time Warner in the mid-1990s when he first began focusing on the future of online shopping, Shapiro noted,”Depending on which metrics you read, there’s already $60 billion in online sales” in just 10 years. “So this world is shifting at an ever-increasing pace.” What’s more, he said, online shoppers are converting at a faster pace than traditional mail order customers.