High-Street Blues

[andrewducker]

I was reading Charlie Stross' post on the impending collapse of the doomed High Street and it reminded me of the ridiculous situation I had buying a PS3 controller just before Christmas.

I wanted a new one, because we only have one, and Little Big Planet looks like it will be fun two-player. So I looked around, discovered that they were £50 in-store in Game, £45 in Amazon, but only £40 in the Game online store. A bit silly, I thought, having to buy it online from the same company, but I ordered it from Game and discovered that they would deliver it to the local store for me. Fantastic, I thought - I can order online and then just drop in and pick it up!

Except that it really _was_ a delivery service, where you have to wait for them to post out a controller to your local shop that's exactly the same as the ones that are already in-store, and then go in and queue along with everyone else, and then the harrassed staff go and root through the back room until they find the parcel that was sent through. Pretty much the opposite of joined-up thinking.

Today, of course, Amazon has it for £5 cheaper than that again, at only £35. And Julie's been ill since she got back, so we haven't actually managed to use it yet anyway.

There's a lesson there somewhere, but I can't quite work out what it is...

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

I meant that my suspicion is that many of the purchases made in stores like HMV and Waterstones are of niche products.

Ah... the famous "long tail"... I suspect this is even more true of online retailers. I think the quote is "On a given day you make more money from things you did not sell any of yesterday than from all your best-sellers together." (Truth depends on exact value of "all your best-sellers" apparently).

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I would have said that bookshops get a lot of sales from Harry Potter big releases, except since they were all putting those on one kind of offer or another to get people into their launch event, I don't know if they DID make money on that.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Sure -- you sell a lot of the big sellers -- but even ignoring the discounts (after all, the "unpopular" book is likely to be much cheaper)... the theory is though that on a a daily basis this is dwarfed by the massive number of things that sell only very infrequently. In online stores with no "shelf space" issue this really comes into its own and it turns out that the niche products may be much more important than the "hits".

It was a trendy theory in the late half of the last decade.

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Future-Business-Selling/dp/1401302378

http://thelongtail.com/about.html

I'd been doing research into the mathematics of the area for some time (statisticians tend to refer to heavy-tail rather than long-tail).