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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Where's the Future?

2Q Video is doing what I expect of every store. Their inventory is online. You can look up things from home or if you go to the store they have a simple desktop offering their website. More importantly, it's small and simple. I despise the websites of major chains with their broken links, poor search engines, and results informing me that the product is available in a store on the other side of the country.

The only thing that 2Q is missing, as a video store, is a system that recommends titles to you based on what you've looked up. The addictiveness of clicking on recommendations, like the endless digging of wikinauts, will replace browsing shelves.

I'm constantly disappointed by stores that don't offer inventory access. Perhaps I don't understand the complex world of inventory but I thought everything is scanned into "the system". Employees have access to this information and they're irritated when they have to hunt for something. I would enjoy doing it myself and would buy a lot more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is extremely true. The worst is when trying to order books from other parts of the world, or from specialty stores. It´s bad enough just trying to find the bookstores´ websites.

I have seen some store inventories that were set up to recommend other products based on your search. However, they seem to be set up based on the type of product rather than by interest. For example, looking at bicycle tires on Canadian Tire´s site will give me other types of tires as well... not the squawky bell thing or pedals I might actually be interested in. Perhaps they do this to help employees.

Anonymous said...

While yer digging down the recommendation rabbit hole, you should read this article about a competition from Netflix to hone that process to its keenest edge.

Also, Melissa, you should almost never buy bike stuff from Canadian Tire, its usually expensive or of very poor quality. Try MEC or your local bike store.