It’s late in the evening and you’ve been working so hard you forgot to eat dinner. By now you’re tired and really don’t feel like cooking. Is your favorite restaurant open? If you’re naive, you check out their website, but you probably already know that’s a useless endeavor.
Except in rare circumstances, restaurants don’t have much of an offline-online connection. If they did, you’d be able to see the menu, learn about wait times, and maybe even get your order in before going down in person.
There has yet to be much to force restaurants to innovate online. One brick and mortar industry that had no choice but to change is the bookstore.
In 2009, Amazon will celebrate its fifteenth year and in that time it has changed the habits of many a book shopper. You can browse just about any book ever, look inside many, search inside some, and then buy it for 30% less than if you drove on down to your local store. It’s incredibly convenient.
Of course, you can’t physically turn the pages or feel the weight of the book. And you can’t have it now. There are many things a real bookstore has going for it, which is why I often go.
Recently I was searching for a few specific titles and wanted to share a tiny way that my hometown store, Powell’s, is embracing the offline-online connection.
When viewing a book listing, such as this one for Designing the Obvious, a table shows which locations I can find the book in stock. I could go down to their technical bookstore, one of my favorite places to go anyway, and grab one of the two copies of that book.
Powell’s has an online presence that allows me to be an offline customer.
When I wasn’t able to find a particular book at Powell’s, I grabbed my iPhone and was happy to see that Borders has a similar system. It doesn’t tell me the number of books in each location, but does list whether or not it is there. Or, well, whether it is “likely” there, phrasing that doesn’t inspire much confidence. At least I knew which Borders to head to and I did find the book there.
The physical bookstores that stick around are going to embrace this offline-online connection. It will become easy to shop both online and in person. And hopefully it won’t just the big guys that will do it, but the small bookstore that really is around the corner.
Similar concepts will expand to other areas. It may take awhile for restaurants to get there, but eventually they’ll have to. And finally, after a long work day, you’ll be able to reserve yourself a table, order an appetizer, and walk down the street to your online eatery.
What about OpenTable.com? Two nice restaurants nearby (K&L Bistro and Syrah Bistro) have OpenTable pages which seem to be accurate regarding hours and allow me to make a reservation for the same evening.
Syrah has its own Web site, but K&L does not.
The question is why don’t restaurants do this, and the answer is that the resulting value vs. the expense is not a clear tradeoff to them (for whatever reason).
What would you say to these restaurants?
Agreed that restaurants don’t see the value. As I said, they have yet to be forced the way Amazon made book retailers come online.
I like that Syrah connects to OpenTable. I think that’s a great offline-online connection example. Findability is an issue with K&L, who doesn’t have a website. But if you know about OpenTable, you can find them, and several other nearby restaurants.
Trust is going to be a problem with these systems as they start to be used. If I place a reservation at a restaurant for an hour from now, will they really get it? Similarly, I didn’t much trust the Borders stock results, and was even a bit unsure of the Powell’s one.
along the trust/value issue from the restaurant’s POV, how do they know you’re going to show up and pay for the appetizer you’ve ordered online? That trust probably has to be built over time as conventions develop.
You’re right. Trust plays a role on both sides. The answer to your problem is to have the customer pay in advance. Of course, if customers don’t trust the reservation, they won’t pay.
And so goes the cycle.