Notes From the Epicenter: eReady for your eHoliday eSpree?

Andrea Dudrow

I’ve bought plenty of stuff online. Heck, it’s fast, it’s convenient, and you don’t have to actually speak to anyone to do it. I’ve sent my mom flowers, I’ve tracked down jackets from Gap Online that had disappeared from my local brick-and-mortar store, I’ve shopped for comic books from the comfort of my bedroom, and I’ve found good deals on gel gloves and a lock for my bike. I’ve even bought a few holiday gifts from Amazon because, well, the e-giant wrapped and mailed them for me, saving me the trouble of having to wait in line at the post office in December.

EverydayItems.com Goes Down!
I have not, however, ordered pet food online (my cats would have eaten through the legs of the couch by the time it arrived), bought makeup on the Web (you have to test the color in person, in my opinion), or had my groceries delivered by an online service (after all, I’m not that busy). I think that makes me pretty much your typical Web shopper, judging from the failure of pet food, makeup, and delivery e-retailers, and the relative success of the online services I have used. So with my local news programs running spots about how this holiday shopping season will make or break the e-commerce industry, I’m thinking it’s more likely to break it.

Okay, so people do use Webvan (groceries) and Red Envelope (gifts), even if I don’t. There are plenty of Bay Area residents living in a higher income bracket than I (I am a writer, after all), and I’m thinking these must be the people who’ve allowed Pottery Barn to stay viable for so long even though I’ve never bought a thing there. So I’m a typical lower-end-of-the-spectrum Web shopper. Still, there aren’t going to be any big e-tailing successes without people like me (eBay anyone?).

Merry dot Christmas
So, back to the holidays: I’m thinking things aren’t looking good for a whole slew of dot-coms. If you follow the news on fu**edcompany, then you know dot-coms are closing up shop faster than lawsuits are being filed in Florida. Most recently, Garden.com shut its e-doors (despite what would seem a promising domain name, at least as branding goes), as did iCast, which gave away movies and MP3s (yeah, like that was going to work). Evite has laid off more than half of its workforce, despite zillions of impending holiday parties (I’m getting an evite a week!), and aLibris recently axed its creative staff (after all, the holidays are about sales, sales, sales).

According to my local newscasters, the toy retailer eToys is struggling (not so the similarly named etoy), an eventuality my clever and prescient friend Roger Paul predicted some time ago.

When All Else Fails, Merge!
Is there any hope? Perhaps. Salon.com recently reported that the formerly bloated and tragically misnamed fashion e-tailer Boo.com, which went down in flames not long ago, has found new life as a subsidiary of the larger fashionmall.com. Could this be a trend? Will Evite find new life as an adjunct of Yahoo!? Will aLibris be reborn as an Amazon channel? Will Webvan and Kozmo find themselves folded into eBay (“Have your auction item delivered within the hour!”)?

It’s probably too early to tell. The folks at Webvan, showing off their new site redesign, have been swearing up and down that they’ll be around for a while more (apparently they didn’t spend all that venture capital on those nifty vans). Other businesses relying on e-commerce will likely hold on at least through this holiday buying season. But with so many tanking so close to the December rush, I’m taking a skeptical view of the e-retail arena. Sure, Web sites did almost $9 billion in business last year, but if they can’t keep going for a full year based on that haul, things aren’t looking too hot.

When it comes right down to it, fighting your way through a crowded mall, waiting in hour-long checkout lines, and hightailing it to the closest bar afterward are part of the holiday shopping experience. Having all your gifts sent through UPS may be handy, but no one likes to show up at a holiday party sans ribbon-encrusted gift box. Plus, if I hadn’t bought any of my holiday gifts in actual stores in recent years, I’d never had seen it snowing in San Francisco’s Chinatown, or gotten to watch ice skaters while eating roasted chestnuts at New York’s Rockefeller Center. Sometimes it pays to remember that the holidays aren’t just about retail.