Brooks: Clever Efforts to Promote Web Sales

To keep more customers, Web retailers have had to change their ways. To attract and hold customers, Brooks used a service called the Angara Reporter that collected demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, from At Home Corp.’s MatchLogic.com and Engage Inc. visitor profiles to create a rough idea of the kinds of customers who visit particular types of sites. Brooks used this information to personalize the content that visitors saw and to tailor offers on the basis of the profiles. Angara’s profile was based on a database of 100 million Web visitors.

Visitors to Brooks’s site were sorted by the site’s best guess as to gender, marital status, and geography. Different visitors saw different home pages. A woman visitor would see a different page from that shown to a man. An unmarried younger man might see a different page from that shown to an older male. Brooks expected that this feature would offer a level of personalization that its regular stores could not match. Yet, as of this writing, Brooks has yet to make a profit. What can we learn from this?

• There are many very sophisticated and clever things that you can do using a database to create sales to consumers on the Web that you could not possibly do in regular merchandising.

• These things all cost money.

• Total Web sales are very tiny in comparison to retail sales.

• These clever things have yet to produce a lasting profit for anyone.

• Anyone trying to sell consumer products on the Web (with a few exceptions, such as Amazon and eBay) is going to lose money for the foreseeable future.