The attentive retail experience I never had

I love shopping online. Not only because I love to shop, but shopping online is becoming a much more pleasant experience than shopping in-store. According to Forrester, US online retail reached $175 billion in 2007 and is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012. I contributed greatly to this growth. In the past 6 months, the majority of my shopping activity happened online. Cat litter and books from Amazon, camera from circuitcity.com and shoes from Zappos.com. So, what’s so great about shopping online?

I finally decided to ditched my Sony T7 for a real camera a couple months ago. The T7 was amazing, but I could use a more advanced camera. After some research on CNET: it finally came down to four candidates:

Canon Rebel, Canon S3, Canon G9, Sony H50

After a lot of online research and peer recommendation, G9 seems like a wise choice. Yet, before I fish out $600 for the camera, I missed the in-store experience. I want to be sell. I want them to tell me why I would love this camera and why I must buy it. I went to CircuitCity, hoping they would sell me like they did online. Compare to all the interactive tools, price breakdown and forums to help me choose the right camera on their website, all I got from going to their store was merely poor customer service. Two CircuitCity stores and none of those sales people spend more than one minute with me.

Amazon is another site which provided me with great purchasing experience. The customer review tool on Amazon is particularly helpful since it surfaces bad reviews. There are many other sites with different shopping enhancement features: Live Chat, Rating, Reviews, Free Return, Extensive Information, Comparison etc. None of the above can fully exist in store. In the old days, the sales rep usually provides most of them. They will help us compare products, tell us any information we need to know about the product or review a product for us based on their usage experience. We have no benchmark against their service before and what they provided seemed really helpful. However, if you look at the product page of any major e-commerce website today, they are like the shopping expert we all need.

As retailers pour money into creating the best online shopping experience, it might just out perform the old in store purchasing experience.

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