1. One of the things P&G already knows about online shoppers is that they expect brand Web sites like Pampers.com to offer the most information anywhere about a product line, including all its size, packaging, and product options. Do you think online outlets like P&G’s eStore can convert more shoppers’ needs for information like this into Internet sales? What other purposes can a pilot Web site like the eStore serve for retailers?

Procter & Gamble (P&G), the global consumer products giant, earns about $79 billion a year from its portfolio of leading brands, including Pampers, Tide, Pantene, Bounty, Pringles, Charmin, Crest, Iams, Oral-B, Olay, Duracell, Gillette, Secret, Old Spice, Fusion, and many others. Operating in 80 countries around the world, the firm employees about 135,000 people.

Currently P&G gets about $500 million a year from e-commerce sales, a fraction of its total annual revenues, and management is looking to increase that amount—perhaps as much as eight-fold to

$4 billion or more. Given that fewer than one in three online buyers shop for consumer package goods, the company isn’t expecting a lot of customers to go online just to buy toothpaste, but it’s optimistic.

Nielsen, the research firm, also expects this category of online purchases to grow as much as 20 to 25 percent in the next few years.

“Some [product] categories see as much as 30 to 50 percent of their business in e-commerce,” said P&G’s digital business chief. “Our forecasts don’t suggest consumer products will ever work like that.

But it’s not out of the realm of possibility e-commerce will be more than 1 percent of our sales. Getting north of 10 percent would be an aggressive goal, but somewhere in between that would be, we think, within the realm of possibility.” P&G already earns about that much of its sales from dollar stores and drugstores.