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Online Retailing Technology >> Surviving the Amazon Jungle

10/29/2004

By Matt Villano

A registration engine also allows community customers to pay and sign an electronic waiver for things like summer camp. In addition, the vendor has developed etailing software for handheld devices, enabling representatives from campus bookstores to sell merchandise while working the aisles of a baseball game, or to buy back books at the end of a semester from any corner of the campus. The software, WirelessPartner, is available now, and is currently in use at schools such as Duke.

On the academic side, some schools expect to develop new etailing capabilities of their own. At San Jose State University (CA), for instance, technologists are working to incorporate real-time sandwich ordering into a dormitory Intranet, enabling residents of one particular dorm to order and pay for sandwiches over the Internet from their rooms, then pick them up in the dorm lobby. And at PLU, Mark Mulder recently unveiled a gift card program that directs parents to LuteWorld to purchase gift certificates for their student children, for either the online or the brick-and-mortar store. According to Mulder, students will be able to “recharge” the gift cards by selling used books back to the bookstore at semester’s end.

“If a student sells back $100 worth of books, we’ll give him $105 or $110 on the card,” he explains. “Might we lose that money? Of course. But putting the extra dollars into purchasing through the bookstore means that the student is more likely to spend more money with us, instead of down the street.”

PLU is also innovating in the area of cross-promotions; through initiatives like its “Send-A-Smile” gift program, the school is tying together the resources of multiple departments to create profit opportunities campuswide. Under the program, parents can log onto LuteWorld and send their children birthday cakes, balloon bouquets, or giant smiley-face cookies. The initial fee for the service is collected by the bookstore, but is shared with the school’s dining services department.

Elsewhere, schools such as the University of Indiana have launched cross-promotional programs that tie the local etailing efforts to the Alumni Relations and Development offices, providing visitors with direct opportunities to donate to scholarships or the school’s annual fund. Every time a shopper purchases an item over a certain dollar amount, she is asked to add a donation (donor determines target of donation) to her order. Down the road, experts predict soliciting donations could become a highly effective application of etailing—that is, for institutions that invest time and energy in establishing such interdepartmental links.

Says Rood at NACAS, “Even if a customer isn’t an alum, once you get him onto the site to buy something, it’s 10 times easier to convince him to donate.”

The Anti-tailer

At a time when most schools strive to sell books online, Cornell University is noticeably and actively absent.

On most college and university campuses across the country, online book sales have become a given. At Cornell University (NY), however, etailing efforts that focus on book sales are anathema.



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