On the back of IBM’s World Avenue cybermall announcement, CompuServe Inc and Prodigy Services Corp say they will broaden their own online shopping areas (CI No 2,932). By the fall, when World Avenue is scheduled to open, Prodigy expects its eight-year-old shopping section, The Market Place, to be converted to HTML and available on the Web. Prodigy has 20 retailers in its Market Place and says it will be able to attract more when it abandons its proprietary system. By moving to the Web it will be easier for us to start doing more deals. The advantage we have is that we can aggregate two million people to our shopping site, where others are just hanging out there on the Internet. Prodigy says the biggest change to its service will be to let users hypertext from a content area to a related retail outlet. Both Prodigy and CompuServe say they strike individual deals with retailers, so that some pay the providers a cut of their profits or volume and others pay a flat fee. CompuServe couldn’t say when its Electronic Mall service would reach the Internet, but after 11 years and with 170 merchants, it predicts it will be the top shopping site. We invented online shopping CompuServe boasted yesterday. The firm says it will move its service to the Internet by year end, but wasn’t certain when Electronic Mall would hit the Web. CompuServe says its shopping service sales grew by 40% in 1995 and traffic increased 80%. But the determining factor may be which service is up and running first. It appears IBM and Prodigy will launch neck and neck, with CompuServe arriving sometime before the end of the year.
