Word: one
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lenk, who started eToys in 1996, pioneered a tricky business. No one else was selling toys online at the volume Lenk envisioned. "There's nothing that's easy," Lenk says. "The details are really hard." Everything--the software, the shipping procedures, the wrapping system--had to be invented on the fly, including the ingenious idea of streamlining the warehouse process by having pickers, packers, loaders, replenishers and order processors all wear different-colored hats. Lenk discovered the hard way that e-businesses couldn't simply duplicate existing retail operations, such as catalog companies, online. "You can't take the mail...
...that permit them to do all three." Companies such as Circuit City and eToys' competitors KB Toys and Toys "R" Us are proving they're not out of the game. "Clicks-and-mortar has a lot of inherent advantages," says Seema Williams, e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research. "For one thing, an existing, powerful brand presence. It's going to be awful tough for an online retailer to maintain its lead once the clicks-and-mortar people get their act together...
Initially, companies with powerful off-line brands had a difficult time overcoming the notion that they would be cannibalizing their core business if they sold through the Web. But as it became clear that e-commerce was a viable and complementary retail channel--albeit one that requires a new skill set--the big off-line players gradually came around to embracing...
...Hannaford set up HomeRuns.com which has upped the ante by offering a double-your-money satisfaction guarantee. It's already doing brisk business in the Boston area. That's no mean feat. Boston is a nasty little incubator of Web grocers and boasts four firms in cutthroat competition; one company, Streamline, will pay to install a fridge in your garage, allowing the Web store to make unattended deliveries...
First things first: I needed a new salt shaker (more than one coffee drinker had got a nasty surprise spooning salt out of the makeshift bowl I keep it in) and a tablecloth that actually fit. I ordered both from Williams-Sonoma williams-sonoma.com) This is where I first felt Screen Rage, a risk at many sites. This arises after you've just filled in every last scrap of personal data, except your shoe size and SAT scores, and the screen freezes on you. Don't think that Mr. Internet has saved anything for you. (If God is a woman, then...