Costco enlightenment

I found our visit to Costco last Friday both pleasant and enlightening. Mike is an excellent speaker and clearly knowledgeable about his topics, which helped me gain a good grasp (at least at a high level) on Costco's marketing methodology. A few things that stood out for me:

Upsell. Or don't. As a few others have also mentioned, I'm curious as to why they do not duplicate the store merchandise online. Or, because they don't, why they don't make a greater effort to cross-sell, or upsell) between the stores and online. It sounds like they are making tentative steps in this direction and working to raise awareness of Costco.com in general, but why not really go for it (and why have they not done it before if this upsell/cross-sell is their strategy)?

One potential reason is that Costco is loathe to disturb the good thing they've already got going. The merchandising in the warehouse stores works the way it is, so why disrupt the balance? Or why break something in an attempt to fix something else? Still, if Costco is serious about Costco.com, they will need to start making some potentially disruptive efforts in their stores to boost traffic.

Where's my package? While I was not exactly surprised to find out that the majority of their customer service calls revolve around package tracking, I was surprised that the solution was to improve shipment times (which as far as I can tell are quite streamlined already). Perhaps they have already tried, but another angle would be to look at the site. I believe Mike said customers can track packages on the site, but is there a way to make this more visible in the site design? Or, the larger point is to investigate whether there is something more to be done on the customer education side rather than on the delivery side.

Surprise! I had never considered before why Costco always had such wild things in their big warehouse store. One day you might find fine art, the next you might find grandfather clocks. On the day we visited, Costco.com posted an $18,499.99 "Scallywag Sloop Pirate Themed Club House" under "This Week's Buyers' Picks" (which begs the question on how they generate these "picks." Probably not unit sales). One of the things I enjoy about visiting Costco is to see what surprising merchandise they have in stock. Having never thought much about it, I didn't really realize it was a clever marketing scheme, and that I had fallen into the trap: Let's go to Costco and see what weird things they have this week.