Industry Eye: Tech Talk & Letteers to the Editor

— James P. Wolowicz, PMP
Former IBM senior consultant

The Author Responds:
When applying merchandise analysis to a Web site, the standard catalog inch-by-inch measurement system typically does not apply. Instead, pure-play Web merchants tend to evenly spread out the cost of their Web site hosting and maintenance/updating over the number of products on the site. Thus, the promotional cost gets amortized over the total number of products. Apart from that one change, most of the other metrics apply.