IBM Corp unveiled plans for its World Avenue virtual shopping mall yesterday, claiming it already has four retailers committed to taking space, though only two, Limited Inc’s Express unit and Hudson Bay Co of Canada are going public at this stage. IBM hopes to have 20 spaces filled by the time the mall opens for business in the fall. Big Blue is charging $30,000 for each site based on a catalog of 300 products, plus a $2,500 monthly fee and 5% of each purchase. For that retailers get tools for their in-house developers to build catalogs and product demonstrations. It sounds pricey, but IBM claims setting up shop at its mall is far cheaper than building a web shopping site from scratch, and cites Forrester Group research suggesting companies spend an average of $593,000 initially and $2.8m every year to maintain their web commerce services. It promises a European version of the mall by year end. Mall services will include personal profiling, gift registry and accessory services. Merchants get a consumer profiling function, market feedback and site sales patterns. Retailers will foot the bill for print and online advertising and attracting consumers. IBM says a council of mall members will have to devise ways of driving traffic to the mall. IBM promises the most advanced implementation of secure sockets layer (SSL) and secure electronic transactions (SET) for electronic payment on the net by the time World Avenue opens for business. However, IBM admits there will still be retailers that want to maintain their own online shopping services and for those customers, such as L.L. Bean, it offers the existing Net.Commerce site-building service.
