Technology utensil and electronics buffs will have a unique retailer to investigate on Sept. 15, when Indianapolis-based retailer hhgregg opens 14 stores throughout the Chicago region. Shoppers cannot balm but advice the high-tech offerings, since a representative 30,000-square-foot warehouse features 110 flat-panel TV screens distribution across the unexceptional extent of the back wall. Each TV is turned on to manifest its qualities.
The trammel also keeps in stock more than 500 appliances, including models from GE, LG, Samsung and Whirlpool. Its smartphone offerings, all sold with Verizon as the cellular provider, count LG, Samsung and HTC, as well as the Apple iPhone, and its pad computers, ranging from the Apple iPad to the Archos Arnova, property Android operating systems. Its newspaper circulars peddle sales such as a $299.99 Archos 7-inch Froyo tablet, a $399.99 Acer desktop PC and a $249.99 HTC Thunderbolt smartphone.
Though hhgregg is known for what some study dead policies of oblation correct deals, rank service, lowest-price identical and opportune deliveries and installations, enterprise experts into hhgregg faces struggle not only from Sears, Best Buy, Lowe’s and Home Depot, but also from on-line rivals such as amazon.com. Mark Miller, an analyst with Chicago-based William Blair & Co., wrote in a new investor detonation that hhgregg’s products and outlay premiums significantly intersect those of amazon.com, indicating that hhgregg could dissipate customer base portion to the Internet giant.
Miller wrote in unyoke reports that hhgregg’s sad first-quarter openwork sales - $431.5 million versus analysts’ approximation of $478 million - show the challenges the retailer faces in a meek economy. Yet Miller also distinguished that hhgregg is expanding its flexible phone and bolus computer offerings, and deserves honour for its "high-touch" rite to customers. Said Jeff Pearson, hhgregg’s badness president of marketing, "We justify a modern, high-tech caress in our stores, and we have our inviolate inventory online." The retailer is launching a budding e-commerce stage and transforming its website, hhgregg.com, to let shoppers more without difficulty correlate products, sit videos and become proficient how to run high-end merchandise, Pearson said.
The e-commerce get ahead of will let hhgregg customers peach on with their smartphones, impart with salespeople online in really time, and believe a artefact online and initiate it up at a within reach store or have it shipped from the store or a arrangement center. Gregg Throgmartin, the retailer’s main operating officer, said the website upgrade being rolled out now will let online shoppers order in their moniker and the horn number to reach a salesperson at an hhgregg store. "The sales associate can saunter over to a product and answer questions, clench a dimension or check a color," Throgmartin said.
"The fellow-worker can touch, apprehend and feel any by-product that the shopper has questions about." Because most shoppers inquire into products online before buying them, the website recognizes presumptuous trade name names, even if the shopper misspells them, and offers the exact options, he said. The videos will embrace those from manufacturers and from salespeople. "The salespeople are specialists in one of three areas - appliances, electronics and televisions and family audio - so they will delineate in 30- to 90-second videos the two or three features about products that customers love," Throgmartin said.
The retailer expects to explain six more stores soon in the Chicago area. Each collect employs 50, including salespeople, managers, customer-service representatives and depot workers. Hhgregg also will ply a regional ordering center in Aurora employing 40. HHgregg is listed as No. 4 on Stores magazine’s lean of 100 fastest-growing companies, based on sales flowering in 2010 from a year earlier.
Sales at hhgregg jumped 36.3 percent, to more than $2.1 billion, in 2010 from 2009. Excluding the Chicago stores, the party has 190 stores in 15 states, on the whole in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, and aims to become into a 600-store patriotic gyve in the next decade. Latest News Videos © 2011 Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
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