| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
With the demise of
so many dot-coms in the last nine months, an old school industry has now
taken up residence on the Web. Moving excess inventory or scooping
up a dying company’s merchandise allows these companies to profit from
the less fortunate, but also allows you to quickly find cheap but quality
merchandise. Some are brick and mortars with online personas, but
here’s one that’s a pure dot-com:
www.overstock.com
Launched in October,
1999 and residing in Salt Lake City, Utah, Overstock.com buys excess inventory
offering jewelry, electronics, housewares, and apparel at 40 – 70% discounts.
Note however, that quantities are limited and therefore the old rule “first
come – first served” is in full force and effect. Merchandise and specials
can change daily.
The site bears the
VeriSign insignia and the banner for the Better Business Bureau Reliability
Program.
The Home Page of
Overstock.com is organized in three basic columns. Down the center
area will the Day’s Best Buys. Specials appear in a box on the right.
On the left is a menu of the categories of merchandise. These are
also repeated as hot buttons across the top: electronics, computer
and home office, hardware and gardening, travel and business, sports and
outdoors, gifts, toys, jewelry, housewares, home décor, apparel,
books, videos and CDs, and babies.
Also on the left
is search box where you can seek items on the site by product or brand.
However, I found the search engine to be much weaker than it should have
been. Its accuracy was very disappointing. A search for “home
lighting” seemed to hone in more on the word ‘home’ than the word ‘lighting.’
The search returned items such as holiday ornaments and magazines, and
missed lighting items that were retrieved by using the drill down menus.
The menus achieved
better results. Using the menu, I clicked on the category link for
Computer & Home Office. This then allowed me to drill down further
and select from computer systems, drives and storage, modems and
networking, printers and peripherals, software, monitors, and office and
phone.
Choosing one of these
categories, results were displayed in alphabetical order by the item name.
You can also sort the category by price, which then displays in ascending
order.
One of the best benefits
of shopping at Overstock is that standard ground shipping (all via UPS)
is free, which adds extra incentive to visit this site.
The February 6 issue
of Business 2.0 says the online market for the excess inventory industry
is less than 1% of the total market, but predictions are that it could
grow 12 – 14% in the next three years. And you can bank that what
starts as a B2C category is going to spread to the B2B market as well.
Knowledge is Power!
:-)
February 2001
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
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