Retailers and Virtual Worlds

[mandy]

1-800-Flowers.com launched a new online store in June, but it isn’t looking to traditional e-commerce metrics to measure the store’s success. For one thing, visitors to the new store can’t buy anything. What they can do is collect a free assortment of virtual flowers and enter contests such as the recently-concluded Virtual Bouquet Design competition or the Fields of the Virtual World snapshot competition.

They also can interact with other store visitors and communicate in-store with representatives of 1-800-Flowers.com. Meanwhile, visitors to 1-800-Flowers.com’s flagship e-commerce site can view and comment on snapshots from the new online store. It’s in these last activities that the company is looking for value from 1-800-Flowers.com in Second Life...

Under the usual metrics retailers apply to their e-commerce sites, Second Life doesn’t measure up. While a major online brand counts monthly visitor traffic in the millions, Second Life’s entire visitor population—defined as the number of resident avatars—though growing, was at around 9 million in August. And Nielsen/NetRatings market measurement reports a unique user base of 774,000 in May. Some experts say transaction functions in parts of the still-developing virtual world aren’t as robust as in the conventional online environment; while fulfillment in the real world provides another challenge...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=23905