Online Bridal Registries - 'Something New' (674 words)
Brides and catalogers turn to online registries
National retail chains used to dominate the wedding gift registry market. Now the Web is cutting catalogers a bigger piece of the $35 billion wedding cake as online gift registries make registering and shopping for gifts easier for far-flung guests.
Renowned gift catalogs, including Ross-Simons and Macys.com, have already put their popular real-world registries online. Now Web gift registry networks are making cross-catalog registrations possible so that a bride and groom with eclectic tastes can register for everything from fine china to outdoor recreation gear.
These registries include Della & James (www.dellajames.com), which was launched by two venture-capital-backed former Stanford M.B.A. students. Della & James participants include Crate & Barrel, Dillard's, Neiman Marcus, Gump's, REI and Williams-Sonoma, some of which also operate their own registries. Instead of considering cross-catalog registries as competition, participants view the additional exposure as an inexpensive customer-acquisition method.
The fledgling Della & James site squares off with WeddingNetwork.com, a Denver-based free online bridal registry founded in 1997 (qualifying it for a silver anniversary in Web time). The site recently announced that it would combine its 750-catalog registry (including Ross-Simons, Calyx & Corolla, Horchow and Sur La Table) with content from Modern Bride magazine—which happens to be published by Primedia, one of WeddingNetwork.com's biggest investors. Both the added content and the well-known Modern Bride brand may give the site an edge in attracting brides.
The potential payoff for catalogers is tempting. Since the average wedding includes 100 to 200 guests who spend about $100 each, a wedding registry offers catalogs multiple high-value transactions—sort of a supercharged friend-get-a-friend program.
Do online registries work? Williams-Sonoma would vote yes. When the upscale home cataloger launched its own online wedding registry at wswedding.com in June, it constituted the company's first foray into e-commerce. According to Pat Connolly, executive vice president and general manager of Williams-Sonoma catalog division, "In its first six days, the site has generated more sales than our largest Williams-Sonoma store without any marketing or advertising to our customers."
Ticketmaster Feeds the Need for Speed
Ten years ago, music fans had to wait in line for hours—even overnight—to purchase tickets for in-demand concerts. The advent of Ticketmaster Online ended the line-up—but unfortunately, it didn't end the wait.
Anyone who's spent time online knows that the wait for pages to download varies from annoying to unbearable—a situation that's a nuisance for consumers but a matter of vital importance for e-commerce sites. In fact, Zona Research, a Redwood City, CA-based IntelliQuest company, recently reported that slow download times could cost online catalogers, marketers and retailers up to $4.35 billion per year in lost sales.
While eight seconds is considered the standard maximum acceptable download time, Zona found that shoppers with slower modems and those visiting certain graphic-intense pages rarely fit into the allotted time frame. Zona summarized user preferences and calculated "bail-out rates" to determine at what point empty-handed prospects were likely to move along in frustration.
To speed shoppers to the checkout before the bail-out point, Ticketmaster Online launched a new user interface with speedier design and more host system access posts to handle traffic spikes.
One big improvement, says John Pleasants, Ticketmaster's president of ticketing and transactions, is that once users search for an event, the new page retains the search in a separate pop-up window, allowing the music fan to make a purchase from nearly any page.
According to Pleasants, the new design "has cut the ticket-purchasing process in half."
So how long does it take to get to the head of the checkout line? Using a networked iMac at 3:15 p.m. on Monday, this editor spent 48 seconds downloading Ticketmaster's homepage. Searching for nearby Bruce Springsteen shows took 10 seconds, displaying show dates and times ate up 20 seconds and downloading the checkout window took another 20 seconds.
Each page took longer than the eight-second "acceptable standard" wait, but the whole experience still beats camping out overnight in line—especially since the Springsteen shows were sold out anyway.
