Mall online: Layton Hills allows shoppers to search out merchandise via Web

LAYTON — In the competitive retail market where online sales threaten sales in stores, the Layton Hills Mall believes it has found a way to offer both shopping options.

The Web site for the Layton Hills Mall, www.shoplaytonhills.com, gives customers the opportunity to search merchandise in stores, send e-mails from the Web site to learn if the item is available in their size, reserve it and pick it up at the mall.

Web sites that combine online and brick-and-mortar shopping are called "hybrids" and are springing up throughout the United States. The Layton Hills Mall service is Utah's first.

Behind the scenes of the Layton Hills Mall's service is NearbyNow, a "mall concierge" company based in Los Altos, Calif., that receives customers' e-mails, calls the Layton Hill's 90 retailers with customers' questions, and replies to the customers. Kiosks in the mall are not included in the service.

The hybrid Web site — which also has a text-messaging component —: aims to combine the efficiency of online shopping with the immediacy of brick-and-mortar shopping.

"If I like a shirt, I don't want to wait for three days for shipping," said Danielle Gallegos, the Layton Hills Mall marketing director.

The Layton Hills Mall is one of 80 malls owned by CBL & Associates Properties Inc. NearbyNow has contracts to serve all the malls' Web sites, as well as the Web sites of about 120 other malls throughout the United States.

The NearbyNow components were added to the Layton Hills Web site in October, but the mall didn't publicize it because stores didn't want to deal with an influx of calls during the holiday season, when they have a high number of seasonal employees, Gallegos said.

Even so, www.shoplaytonhills.com received 514 hits in December, Gallegos said.

About 1.5 million people use the Web sites of the 200 malls that NearbyNow serve. About 10,000 people use NearbyNow's text-messaging service, said Theresa Boldrini-Laird, marketing director for NearbyNow Inc.

The mall Web sites are updated daily to reflect sale prices and new merchandise.

"We have relationships with a bunch of retailers, and they provide us with datafeeds," Boldrini-Laird said. "We constantly upload every day."

That means that the products pictured on www.shoplaytonhills.com may not necessarily be on store shelves, because NearbyNow uploads all the merchandise and does not differentiate among the offerings at different store locations. A customer e-mail — which NearbyNow promises to reply to within 10 minutes — will nail down whether the store carries the item and if it's in the customer's size or favorite color.