Customers in the Driver's Seat.(Company overview)

Gifts & Decorative Accessories, January, 2007

By Brent Felgner

Super-charged choices and stiff market competition give consumers control of the gift market

Picture this: a shopper peruses your store aisles until finding the item she's looking for. But she's nowhere near making a purchase decision. Instead, she aims her camera phone at the product's barcode, clicks to scan it, then clicks again to send. But what if she doesn't have a camera phone? No problem, she can manually enter the bar code numbers and almost instantly, Amazon.com, Shopping.com or another retail service fills the phone screen with detailed product information, reviews and -- get this -- a list of competing retailers, all within two or three miles.

It gets worse. There are maps and directions, in-stock...

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