CUSTOMER SERVICE WEB INNOVATIONS

Pet owners at a loss for what to buy their feline or canine companions to eat or play with can now turn to Petsmart.com and Pets.com, which have designed customized search engines to help consumers make these purchases. (The engines cover only cats and dogs; ferret, hamster and bird people are on their own.)

Petsmart's site features a Pet Food Calculator, which allows online shoppers to enter information about their pets—such as the animal's weight, activity level, age and breed— that might be useful in selecting food.

The Pet Food Calculator returns a list of recommended foods, along with suggested portion sizes to maintain healthy weight, as well as ingredient lists and product comparisons and reviews.

Petsmart.com doesn't really recommend foods for different cat or dog breeds. "We ask for the breed so that we can determine if there are specific breeds showing up more than others," explains Mark Siegel, the site's marketing director. "It's more of a research tool, but 'breed' isn't a mandatory category [to use the service]."

Meanwhile, for advice on choosing pet gifts—a concept that Siegel calls "a little goofy"—consumers can consult Pets.com's Gift Matcher service. This innovation helps shoppers find the perfect toy or gadget for the cat or dog who "is in vogue," "has everything," "loves to celebrate," or matches one of the other seven available "lifestyle choices."



Clothing has been a harder category to market on the Web for the simple reason that customers need to be completely accurate about their size to get the right garment. But that's no longer an issue for Lids, a retailer of hats bearing the logos and names of athletic teams.

The Westwood, Mass.-based chain, which operates 350 namesake stores in 42 states, as well as its lids.com Web site, has come up with what it calls the "Melon Meter"—essentially a tape measure that cybershoppers can download, print out and use to measure their head size. To access the Melon Meter, which Lids created with help from Fort Point Partners and Concrete Image, shoppers just need Adobe Acrobat software, which they can download for free at the site.

Ben Fischman, the firm's co-founder and vice president of marketing, says the Melon Meter has proved to Lids that "the bricks and clicks phenomenon really works." That's because Lids has used its stores to help drive traffic to the Web site, where half the sales have been of fitted caps as opposed to the adjustable, one size fits all variety—a trend that Fischman attributes to the Melon Meter. "The Melon Meter has been tremendous. Our returns are under 1%," he says.

This month, Lids is capitalizing on the NCAA basketball tournament by distributing 750,000 "Lids Madness" tickets that direct customers to the Web site, where they can win such prizes as a new Jeep. Fischman says that he expects eretailing to remain a strong part of Lids' business.