The Genius of QVC

I actually bought a couple of Christmas gifts (a Slanket and a kitchen gadget) from QVC.com last year. If you can deal with their huge shipping and handling (most stuff is drop-shipped) and quirky product selection, it's actually kind of a premium experience.

Think about it this way. It's an e-commerce site where, for every item, there is a 3-5 minute video clip of the product being used, worn, prepared or demonstrated. That is pretty huge. For products where just a couple of pictures won't do, watching a video on QVC.com can get people a lot more familiar with the product.

But, inexcusably, accessing this most unique feature on their product page requires you to click an easily-missed tab! In the YouTube era, that is just silly. I think they just don't realize what they have. If you started a webstore and went to the trouble of shooting video clips for every product, don't you think you would at least put them on the main page body instead of hiding them in a separate section?!?

Megan McArdle, the author of this article, has a very active and interesting blog on economic issues:

http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle

Its usually the first thing I go for when I check my RSS feed.

Great article. The detail that really grabbed me was the producer watching the call volume, telling the presenter to repeat whatever they'd just said that made it spike.

reminds me of skymall exposes:

http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/a-pilgrimage... http://www.slate.com/id/2164517/pagenum/all/#p2