Later, while surfing at NeimanMarcus.com, you receive a promotional coupon good for 30 percent off matching shoes.
Too good to be true? Retailers say they are busy implementing software that will do exactly that within the next year.
They call it "multichannel Web marketing", and experts say it could revolutionize the way people shop--both online and in retail stores.
"This stuff is magic to retailers," said Gary Hennerberg, head of marketing consultancy The Hennerberg Group in Grapevine, Texas. "A couple of years from now, every brick-and-mortar with online operations is going to be doing this."
Behind the idea of multichannel Web marketing are software companies eager to unite retailers' legacy systems with their modern databases for online operations. IBM, one of the largest players in the e-commerce software field, unveiled MerchantReach on Aug 1 for retailers that want to compile customer information from their stores and Web sites.
The problem that IBM and other software companies are attempting to solve began in the early days of e-commerce. Many retailers' first tentative online ventures consisted of order-processing systems that were either loosely connected or entirely separate from the mainframe or other big-system databases that housed the bulk of their customer information. In essence, many retailers maintained two database and order-entry systems: one for their traditional retail operations and another for their Web ventures. Linking the two systems has often been an afterthought.
The dual databases meant that, for instance, stores did not know that the Bill Smith buying cookware in the Austin, Texas, store was the same Bill Smith who purchased a gas grill from the online site last week. Opportunities for "up-selling" were lost, and customers could have been offended that they were not rewarded with better customer service after making big-ticket purchases.
Many retailers still operate with separate systems, or are just beginning to link their disparate databases. Special software for linking new and old databases and for "scrubbing" data to ensure that records are valid has existed for years.
Database software market leader Oracle, as well as BEA Systems and Microsoft, offer various tools, as do smaller specialty software makers. But IBM is one of the first companies to tackle the problem with a mix of software and services.
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