Article: Passing on En Passant: attention, shoppers: virtual malls don't make it. (Apple's CD-ROM of digitized shopping catalogs; home-shopping on America Online and the Compact Disc Connection) (Software Review) (The Iconoclast)(Column) (Evaluation)

Shopping by computer is one of the best things to come along in years--from a retailer's point of view. The salespeople are software agents, who ask little in the way of wages. The real estate consists of a sales floor inside the consumer's personal computer, on which the retailer pays no rent, mortgage, or taxes. Shoplifting is unheard of. And the customer base is almost limitless, bounded by neither geography nor other real-world constraints like closing one's doors upon the onset of darkness. Is it any wonder that every marketer from Sears to Spiegel is getting in on the action, setting up storefronts in online virtual malls and publishing catalogs on CD-ROM?

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