2012 100 - Networld Media Group

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TARGET
After spending two years preparing to
take control of its website from Amazon.com,
a prominent link (“learn all
about what’s new”) on Target’s home
page failed to work when the site went
live in August. That was just the beginning.
Three weeks later, the release of
a collection from Italian fashion house
Missoni brought a rush of visitors that
crashed the site for most of the day. A
month later, the site went down again
during peak shopping hours. Later
that day, Target announced in a one-
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LULULEMON
Vancouver-based athletic apparel company
Lululemon Athletica has caught
fire with yoga enthusiasts to a degree
that sent its competitors stumbling
over themselves in pursuit of customers
willing to spend $98 on stretchy
yoga pants. Mimicking Lululemon’s
winning strategy, Nike’s Salvation
chain of athletic-wear stores introduced
$64 training capris featuring a
yoga-studio format and similar logo.
Gap’s Athleta stores began selling $60
women’s yoga tops and offering free
yoga classes — another Lululemon innovation.
Nordstrom’s Zella line, dedicated to
yoga attire, went so far as to hire a
Lululemon alum to launch the effort.
Since opening its first store in the
United States in 2003, Lululemon’s aggressive
strategy has paid off with revenues
growing from $40.7 million in
2004 to $711.7 million in 2010.
sentence statement that Target.com
president Steve Eastman had left the
company to “pursue other opportunities.”
All told, Target.com crashes
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TABLET COMPUTERS IN-STORE
An estimated 25 percent of all tablet
computers purchased in 2011 were
bought by enterprises, and 25 percent
of those enterprises were retailers. Retailers
are putting tablets to work as
digital catalogs, signage and in-store
information kiosks. Tablet computing
solutions connect retail sales associates
with a wealth of knowledge, including
product information, learning tools,
real-time product inventory, customer
reviews and ratings, updated price and
promotional information, as well as the
ability to print or email any of these.
Unlike other business solutions that
require a great deal of infrastructure
and integration efforts, tablet computing
solutions require minimal impact
on existing systems and are often more
reliable than other solutions. In-store
tablet computing systems provide retailers
with consistent sales processes
that can be promoted across all stores,
increased sales, significantly reduced
accounted for more than half of the
major outages on the top 100 sites in
the U.S. by revenue, according to Web
monitor AlertBot. Still, e-commerce
analyst Colin Sebastian at Robert W.
Baird & Co contends that Target made
the right move. “The complexity of
building a large-scale e-commerce site
is really difficult,” he said. “But, at the
end of the day, Target made the right
decision. Amazon is a competitor, and
you don’t want them controlling your
e-commerce business.”
learning curves for new hires, more
engaging and knowledgeable sales associates,
sales associates’ ability to help
customers in more store departments
and a more pleasant and efficient buying
experience for customers.
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