Palm Beach Post goes shopping, in a big way

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post is offering its customers a shopping experience that won’t wear out their shoes.

And it appears to be working, with the newspaper reporting it has more than 6 million items from hundreds of retailers on its shopping channel.

The shopping site uses HarvestInfo’s ShopMountain platform, which allows consumers to search and purchase products from various online retailers.

“Creating this powerful integrated search environment gives us a competitive edge,” said Gina C. Wilcox, director of online development at The Post, adding that the site is also accessible via cell phone and PDA.

The Palm Beach Post’s HarvestInfo-powered shopping site has
more than 6 million items on display.

In addition to the online inventory, about 20,000 items from hundreds of local business and private-party sellers are displayed in classified liners and display ads supported by the database.

The shopping channel is consistently in the top eight most popular areas of the paper’s Web site and sees tens of thousands of unique visitors each month, Wilcox said.

Kiosks complement the mobile service, which lets cell phone and PDA users access the site, Wilcox said.

Versatile formats

“We’re serving up information in the format consumers want to receive it,” she said. “More people today have mobile devices than access to the Internet on a PC.”

The Post first used kiosks five years ago. They now number 60, sprinkled across six counties.

In 2006, 300,000 people, accounting for more than 2.5 million page views, used the kiosks.

Users can search, apply for jobs, make print outs and e-mail listings to a friend. They can also contact sellers, Realtors and car dealers through the kiosks.

Newspapers are beginning to realize that publishing print ads online is not enough to create a compelling shopping experience, Wilcox said.

“We’ve had to shift our thinking to embrace change and react quickly to consumer trends in order to stay competitive,” she said. “The key to being able to make this shift rests in having support for it throughout your organization.”