Product Information and the Infinite Aisle

As retailers consider monetising the Long Tail, they could do well to review the cost of creating their product listings.

The Infinite Aisle (or “Endless Aisle”) is a term that first started to appear in retail in the early 2000s with the concept of an in-store kiosk.

Since then it’s become increasingly used with online retail, where, thanks to the rise of drop-shipping, the endless aisle allows retailers to increase their ranges, almost ad infinitum.

The infinite aisle is actually a lesson in economics. Beyond the popular “head” of the distribution curve is a shallow tail of elusive sales that often promise fat gross profit margin. Want this laptop but with more memory? Of course Sir!

Remember Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail? Anderson suggested that the future would be about selling “less of more”. Well, our experience with electronics goods suggests that this isn’t the case (a handful of products and vendors continue to dominate), but ranges are definitely lengthening, and there’s scope to go a lot further with an increasing number of potential variants and component combinations.

Actually Long Tail retail is not new. For years retailers have had “A” ranges and “B” ranges. The idea was that the A range would be featured in physical stores while B would be available via so-called “special order”.

With Australian retailers reporting they spend can spend up to 45 minutes onboarding every product that they show online, this creates an artificial limit on the Tail. Every retailer has a minimal viable order size below which it is no longer economic to “range” the SKU. Why? Not because of pricing, since this can be done on a cost plus basis for non-mainstream SKUs. Not because of warehousing, since drop-shipping passes the responsibility back to the vendor. The limit is set by the time taken to set up products.

While the marginal cost of ranging a B-range product needs to be small, for a truly endless scenario, the marginal cost of an additional product needs to be almost zero.

Product Lighthouse operates an industry-standard solution to deliver standardised content for electronics goods to where it is needed, fast. More information and to sign up: www.productlighthouse.com.