For a lot of technology stuff it’s one thing to know that product X beats product Y on specifications, but things like holding it in your hand, feeling the size & weight and playing with the user interface can make the difference between sale and no-sale.

I’ll often go to an electronics retailer after I’ve done my research and play around with the product. If I like it and their price is competitive then I’ll buy it, otherwise I’ll go home and wait a week for someone to ship it.

Oh, and the “one price promise” is a good thing to push. Remember a year ago when Best Buy got caught out – their shop-floor computers pointed to a special intranet version of their website which looked identical but showed the offline prices rather than the online prices from the internet website. Consumers would come into the shop, see a product they liked, check the price on a computer (thinking they were checking the online price), find it was the same and so make the purchase there & then – when they might have saved money if they’d left the store and bought online.

Quite frankly, it’s either that not enough customers aren’t aware of the eCommerce component of Circuit City (because most people just walk into the store anyway–a very small percentage of people actually do shop online anyway), or Circuit City just doesn’t have a quality retail experience that buoys their online channel. Most Joe the Plumbers (or Six-Pack or eCommerce Consultant) want to be educated of the tech they’re buying and CC severely lacks that. The brick and mortar retail stores hire too many uneducated sales reps that don’t know an Intel Atom from their friend named Adam.

I worked in a CompUSA as a sales rep–I know.

CC has established itself as a retail presence and if they can’t get that right, then they’re worth just 29 cents a share.

What kind of ecom experience will it be when they don’t have a website presence?

They are trying to hold on until after the holiday season, but we will see if they can.