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Cashing in on the home shopping boom

Black Enterprise, Feb, 1995 by Cassandra Hayes

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There are various levels of buying that range from the junior to assistant level, starting at $30,000 to $37,000 a year. Buyers and senior buyers can command salaries between $45,000 and $85,000 annually.

AT THE HUB OF TV SHOPPING

As senior vice president of customer services, John Hunter is responsible for QVC's 2,800-person phone center telemarketing pool, which accounts for more than 50% of QVC's workforce. "When the headhunter called me, I didn't even want to come up to look at the place," says Hunter, 43, who was turned off by the idea of television retailing at first. "I didn't know what QVC was, but with my experience in telemarketing, I understood that people were going to do more shopping over the phone in the future," he adds. After earning a degree in marketing from New York's Pace University, Hunter worked in sales, marketing and service for nine years at Avis Rent-a-Car. Before joining QVC in 1991, he was a senior vice president of telemarketing at Citibank.

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Interfacing with merchants, marketing, programming and production people are part of Hunter's day-to-day responsibilities to ensure that QVC's 60 million callers a year are treated right. It's a much faster industry than he was used to, but Hunter says it's an excellent one for African-American professionals. "The growth is so fast and furious that companies are saying we want someone who can help me now," says Hunter. "Unlike other companies that have staunch lines of demarcation, a lot of opportunities exist here." For executives of Hunter's caliber, salaries can top $150,000 and may include stock options and bonuses as well.

GETTING ONLINE

Both QVC and HSN seek to increase the merchandise they offer, but a major roadblock stands in their way. They need the distribution channels so that viewers don't have to wait two hours to see the product they want, says Robert Dansby, vice president of Analysis Group, an economic and financial consulting group in Cambridge, Mass. Constrained by the fact that only one product at a time can be presented on television, HSN and QVC are looking to offer interactive shopping, where an audience can view any product any time and make purchases through their TV sets. This technical advance will depend on the ability of telephone companies to become involved in interactive video services, says Dansby. Viacom and Time Warner are already testing it. With any success, consumers will not have to leave their homes to shop; they'll just point and press their remote control.

As those shopping opportunities continue to change and expand, so will the career options within the industry. "It's an industry that is experiencing so much growth," says Mason, HSN's sales host. "But people don't know how to get into the business." Yet that could change with the click of a remote.

RELATED ARTICLE: THE ARCHITECTS OF TV SHOPPING

The unlikely idea of TV shopping was born in 1982 after two Florida entrepreneurs, Roy Speer and Lowell Paxson, converted their successful Home Shopping Club radio sles program in to a cable show. HSN set up shop in a strip mall in St. Petersburg--employees had to go outside to get from one department to the next.

Cashing in on the home shopping boom

Black Enterprise, Feb, 1995 by Cassandra Hayes

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