E-commerce: Winning the War

Conclusion #2: While it’s not clear that the Internet will eliminate backorders and overstocks, it can be a big help. Can you integrate your Internet presence into your liquidation strategy? Are you making backorder dates clear to the customer when they order?

Catalogers have won the battle with pure e-tailers. E-tailers have hit the wall while our e-commerce sales have grown by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately this has not translated into significant new profits—yet. The Internet has inspired great new creative energy in our companies. Our customers love our new Web sites, we have access to dozens of new technical tricks to enhance sales and customer satisfaction, and we’ve built sites that both look great and work. Now it’s time to focus that creative energy on producing the incremental sales growth and operating cost improvements this new technology affords us. The outlook for direct marketing has never been better!