Apr 28, 2010

Shopping Scientist Paco Underhill Tackles Online RetailBy Geoffrey A. FowlerBlogs.WSJ.com

Paco Underhill, CEO of Envirosell and a renowned scholar of consumer culture, has a message for retailers: It’s no longer the early 20th century.

Too many retailers, he said in a recent interview with this blog, treat shoppers like they did back in the early boom days of department stores, before technology enabled consumers to easily compare prices and products elsewhere. Many retailers, he said, treat mall shopping and online shopping as entirely different things — as if their customers don’t actually do both.

Branding and retail gurus have been “handed back their lunch,” he said, and are now several steps behind a generation of always-online smart phone-equipped shoppers. Why, he wonders, would stores sell a product for one price online, and another in the store? Yet even in 2010, that remains common.

So Underhill, who made his name helping to improve the design of retail spaces, is turning his attention to e-commerce. He has launched a collaboration with Rich Relevance, a San Francisco firm founded by several former Amazon.com engineers that makes software to help retail Web sites create personalized product recommendations. (You know those emails you get from Amazon that say since you bought X, you might also like Y? These folks helped invent that.)

In November, Envirosell and Rich Relevance conducted a series of secret shopper missions in which they tried to get stores to match their online prices and to take returns for online purchases. The answer, in many of the situations, was no – a disaster from a customer service point of view. The best retailers, said Rich Relevance CEO David Sellinger, have an executive specifically in charge of what’s known as cross-channel shopping, or the consumer who buys things online and in the store.

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