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Online Shopping Sites Fight Customer Bailouts

During the latest year-end holiday season, both TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com tested a checkout system in which customers used a single page for all shipping and billing information. Fifty per cent more customers completed the checkout process than had finished the multipage process.

For many e-commerce sites, the shopping cart is where transactions go to die. More than half of all prospective customers bail out of their purchases sometime after selecting products and before hitting the "buy" button, according to Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm.

That predicament has prompted sites like Macys.com, TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com to seek new ways to shepherd customers diligently through the checkout process. As traditional retailers sharpen their online operations, those kinds of improvements could be critical in winning business.

Take TJX, which owns T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, among other retail chains. Last autumn, the company opened online stores for T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods, using a traditional checkout method in which users clicked through multiple screens while typing in shipping information, credit card numbers and the like.

Ease of Access

"We make it as easy as possible to get in and out of our stores easily, so when we went to the Web, this seemed like a natural progression," Sherry Lang, a TJX spokeswoman, said.

The technology is known as a "rich Internet application" in industry circles.

Such applications work by loading a small, temporary software application onto the user's computer when he or she clicks on a particular Web page. The Web site feeds information instantly to that software program in the background so that when someone, say, types in an invalid postal code while checking out, the computer flags it and requests a correction.

The technology itself is not new. Tech-savvy companies like Kayak.com, a travel search site, have deemed such applications important enough in recent months to build onto their own technology. As Kayak's site presents search results, it also loads into the computer's temporary memory the details of hundreds of fares. Then, when visitors use the control panel to select different target prices or flight dates, the relevant fares instantly replace the previous set.

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Ford's New Big Push

Ford Motor is applying the hard sell these days as it competes with Asian carmakers piling on incentives, doling out marketing DVDs and brochures, and making offers it hopes are too good to pass up.

But Ford's new big push is not to sell cars. Instead, it is trying to sign up thousands of workers to take buyouts, partly by convincing them that their brightest future lies outside the company that long offered middle-class wages for blue-collar workers.

So Ford is pitching a buffet of buyout packages that are easily among the richest ever offered to factory workers, including onetime cash payments of $140,000 or college tuition plans for entire family.

The automaker is also putting on job fairs in its plants and mailing each of its 54,000 hourly workers a feature-length DVD, titled "Connecting with Your Future", which extols the promise of new careers beyond the assembly line.

Last Friday, inside a huge sheet-metal stamping plant in this industrial center south of Detroit. Ford workers spent their lunch hour perusing opportunities to go back to school, hire on at growing companies and open fast-food franchises.

The unprecedented push to move workers out reflects the tough times in Detroit. Ford has lost $15 million in the past two years, and General Motors and Chrysler are also reconstructing after heavy losses. The belt-tightening follows years of declining market share and increased competition from foreign automakers led by Toyota.

While Detroit's Big Three have already cut about 80,000 jobs through buyouts and early retirements since 2006, a new blitz is under way to shrink employment even further to make way for lower-paid workers in the future.