Can you name all the new e-tailing mega-malls – one-stop shops that sell direct or as portals to contracted merchants – that have opened on the Web in the past year or so?

Yahoo, Excite and Amazon, of course, have them. Bizrate and walmart.com have entered the fray, with the latter using a partner to add travel services to its usual offerings of garden hoses and towels. So it isn't so surprising a recent survey of more than 1,700 online shoppers by Active Research reports four times as many buyers take their shopping needs to a portal first rather than to an e-tailer site.

What is rocking the e-boat, says Jonathan Brookner, director of One to One Research, Stamford, CT, is the extent to which these mega-malls are using the unique qualities of the Web to laser-focus on capturing customer loyalty.

Since convenience is the primary motive of online shoppers (as reported in the Active Research survey), they tend to gravitate toward those malls that offer functions of expediency. Those include digital wallets that store transaction data and credit-card records no matter which shop within the mall is patronized, and address books that not only make sending gifts more convenient, but also allow customers to do repeat business with the same retailer without having to re-enter data.

This pre-filling of data is a "sticky" feature which, along with one-click ordering and frequent-shopper reward programs, are used by mega-stores to keep customers coming back by saving them time or money.

Why is this surge of mega-malls significant? Brookner's research suggests specialty-goods and catalog-based retail sites in the consumer-goods industry lag behind most industries in one-to-one capabilities. While they've concentrated on trying to get their inventories online, and their fulfillment and customer-service departments working satisfactorily, their non-traditional competitors have been forging the tools they need in the battle for the customer.

Since the specialty retailers haven't yet developed customer-relationship-building features, they're vulnerable to attacks from the new mega-malls. Reports from the front say e-tailers are angry the malls offer shoppers search engines for comparison pricing (to save customers' time and money), and that the malls have basically decided they now own the customer. The fulfillment end of it? You guessed it: Leave it to the e-tailers.

Many retailers, such as Barnes & Noble and J. Crew, understand integrating their marketing with partners is a key to responding to the mega-mall threat. But the focus so far is on affiliate marketing to acquire new customers by cross-selling, using free advertising space and links on the post-transaction page. Affiliated retailers also use e-mail to lure new customers through discount coupons.

According to Brookner, building more convenience and other customer-loyalty-enhancing capabilities into their sites is a step specialty retailers must take or give up the fight to the encroaching advances of all those mega-malls.

- by Mark E. Dixon