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Dreaming of an E-holiday
Area merchants find customers embracing online shopping as never before
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Business New Haven
12/13/1999
By: Abigail White
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It's 3 o'clock in the morning and the alpha shopper is making her way through her holiday gift list while shopping on the Internet. Visiting different "click-and-mortar" sites - and the store hours couldn't be more convenient.
No crowds, no long lines - just browse, select, pay and onto the next
site. What could be easier? Our shopper has made her virtual hunting
easier by making a list of Web addresses gathered from store catalogues and from those that have been recommended by friends and acquaintances.
They make their way through the Web addresses, and if the site is easy to navigate and doesn't crash during the visit, our shopper completes the
purchase by indicating credit-card information and shipping instructions.
Knowing there's a chance that a gift will be exchanged, our shopper makes a quick note of each site's return policy.
"I definitely think that Internet shopping is the wave of the future," says Casey Pillis, owner of Aqua Arts in New Haven. "It's the 21st-century
version of the mail order."
Aqua Arts launched its Web site two years ago to showcase its indoor water fountains to Web-savvy browsers. "The Web site is doing fine - it certainly has paid for itself," says Pillis. "We're going to update the Web site for the new year, and really go whole-hog on promoting it. We plan to add care and feeding of your fountain in a FAQ (frequently asked questions) section, and we're going to add sound bytes so you can actually hear some of the fountains."
Pillis says promoting the Web address (which happens to be the same as the store name) has worked well in local marketing. "We did a television
commercial with TCI, and sometimes the only thing people remember is that we have a Web site and store's name, and they pop in www.aquaarts.com and they find us," said Pillis. I use the Web address in all my advertising. I put it in all my publications, on my business cards, and on every product sticker. We are now going to try to position it in the different search engines.
"The traffic on the Web site definitely picks up during the holiday season," Pillis adds. "There's a pick-up in the number of hits (the tracked
number of visitors to the site) and the number of orders coming from
everywhere: California, Texas, Florida. What we have found by having the Web site is that if you promote it properly, it can expose a small business to markets that you wouldn't normally reach. A lot of the small businesses have been losing market share to the major chains, and now you can be reached by customers in another city - halfway across the country, without having to physically advertise there in a paper or magazine."
Pillis notes that "The Internet is worldwide, and it gives an equalizer to the small business by giving them the chance to get into global marketing without having to stretch their wings too far."
Another New Haven-area company involved in e-commerce is ehammer.com, a live, interactive Internet-based auction business that trafficks exclusively in antiques and collectibles.
"It's a person-to-person international trading forum where anybody, anywhere can upload things to our auction," explains Fred Gianpietro,
CEO of ehammer, who launched the site at the beginning of 1998. "And we feel that incorporating customer service behind Web sites is the future of the Internet as we know it.
"I think that that is what Web entrepreneurs haven't figured out yet," Gianpietro says, "that no matter how automated you get, unless you're
going to get customer service at the other end of it, people aren't going to
go back to your site.
"What we do is very similar to what Amazon.com and E-bay do, except we're more of a boutique site. We're focusing on a particular market, our price points are higher and we deal with a lot of specialty items. For
instance, we just auctioned John Lennon's last signature for $150,000; and we just auctioned an 18th-century Chippendale lowboy for $50,000,"
Gianpietro says.
"Not only do we sell things up to the six-figures area; we also sell things for $5 - so it's open to everybody. You can have a specialty item or you can have a baseball card."
Gianpietro says that 1999 has been marked by higher sales than 1998. "We think the year 2000 will be a much, much bigger year for ehammer because people are more comfortable shopping on the Internet. Activity on the site is picking up this holiday season. We have people loading things up on our site for Christmas buying season. I can see it happening as we speak - lower-priced items like jewelry, and shippable items.
"People are more comfortable buying on the Internet," Gianpietro continues. "I personally feel safer on the Internet. When you go to the store and swipe your credit card at the cash register, it's going over the same modem lines as when you put your credit card information onto the Internet. All of the Internet processing goes through a separate credit-card server, and whenever you put in your credit-card information it goes to that server over the same modem line and is encrypted so it cannot be deciphered, and then it goes over a direct line to the bank. The reality is - it's incredibly safe."
Gianpietro believes that "Because ehammer is dealing in antiques and collectibles, we're dealing with items that are unique, so we feel we lend ourselves really well to the idea of bricks and mortar, the showroom concept. We're opening a new showroom here in New Haven on Audubon Street. We also have showrooms in Hartford, Hudson, N.Y. and Woodstock, Vt. People can actually bring in items and we'll auction them on the Internet. By having our showrooms, we're trying to add the aspect of customer service into the Internet."
It's a concept that's catching on. "We have 15,000 registered users; that's growing by over 1,000 a month. We have over 1,000 categories of antiques and collectibles to choose from; and on any particular day we have about 2,500 auctions going on simultaneously. We have something for everyone."
For those looking for an alternative to sending flowers and fruit baskets, there's CookieBloomers.com: a mail-order company that offers "long-stemmed" cookies for every occasion.
"In many cases the Web site is a replica of our printed catalogue," says Al Guthrie, vice president and partner of Cookie Bloomers of Milford. "We promote Cookie Bloomers through some banner advertising on the Web; we do a lot of radio and a fair amount of print advertising. Then we mine our own database and send out mailings. We get a lot of business through word-of-mouth - we track the sources of these by
asking every customer: 'How did you hear about us?' It's kind of interesting how much of it is word-of-mouth."
As is true for many retailers, Cookie Bloomers' business is highly seasonal. "Christmas happens to be our second busiest season," Guthrie explains. "Valentine's Day is our first. We launched the Web site in 1997. There are many things on the Web site that haven't made it into the catalogue; you can more quickly change a Web site than you can reprint your catalogs.
"We ship our orders to all 50 states," Guthrie says. "The only downside to the Web site is that sometimes there's a glitch and the site is inaccessible. And unless one of your customers tells you, you don't know that you're offline.
And Guthrie observes that holiday shoppers this year are embracing online shopping as never before.
"The holiday traffic on the Web site has been excellent," he says. "We have gotten orders from people we would have never found. For example: We just got a very large order from a public-relations company in Boston that happened to be surfing on the Web.
"I think Web sites in general are a great way for small businesses to grow. We not only have had double digit-growth that just keeps on going - and I don't think there's any top to it."
For those looking for an alternate way to ship their packages this holiday season and the rest of the year, there is a same-day delivery service out of Cheshire that can be reached by phone and, of course, on the Web (jadex.com): JADEX Courier.
"We handle anything non-hazardous, from letters to machinery, and
will pack or crate your shipment to your specifications. We have a network of couriers throughout the country and into Canada," says JADEX owner Jay Sperry.
JADEX has been online since 1995. Sperry says the company's Web site brought in customers by giving them information before they call. The site offers information about JADEX services for ground and air deliveries, rates for various transport options and government and transportation links to other sites.
"Calls come from all over the country and I think it's amusing
that we get more out-of-state jobs, like from one place in San Francisco to another, or in Chicago, than in Connecticut," says Sperry. "We look
forward to doing more business off the web next year."
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