After seeing stunning results during its on-line store’s first year of operation, Dell Canada has begun to refine its e-commerce strategy by targeting the education market with three new sector-specific sites.

Called The Higher Education Store, The K-12 Store and The Student Store (all acessible at www.dell.ca/education), the three sub-sites feature special on-line promotions, bundles and pricing discounts for educators.

By offering the education market a targeted e-commerce site, Dell says it’s responding, as other companies have done, to new pressures on the publicly funded education system for more cost-efficient products and purchasing methods. But the move also signals a more sophisticated on-line segmentation strategy that divides the Dell Canada Store site into three sections: Home & Business, Education, and Government. More targeted sites could follow.

‘Dell customers have clearly embraced buying over the Internet,’ said Scott O’Hare, president of Dell Canada, in a prepared statement. ‘As The Dell Store enters its second year, we will continue to devote significant effort to extending the on-line experience through services like Dell Online Leasing and The Dell Educational Store. Our goal is to achieve 50% of sales over the Internet by the Year 2000.’

To do that, Dell already tailors its on-line ‘experience’ geographically with 42 country-specific sites, but within Canada alone, 60% of overall sales are to large corporations and government instutions. By tailoring on-line services and promotions to the widely dispersed market of schools, school boards and universities across the country, Dell could potentially win an even bigger share of the institutional pc-supply pie.

Burrowing down even further, Dell also delivers a targeted on-line experience to individual companies via its Dell Premier Pages service: a series of customized, password-protected Extranet sites that provide private access to purchasing, purchase history reporting, order status and help-desk support for large corporate clients.

Supporting the Education Store move is a $15,000 donation in hardware and services to SchoolNet, a joint federal/ provincial initiative to connect 16,500 schools and 3,400 libraries to the Internet by the end of fiscal 1998.

Dell claims the general Dell Canada Store (www.dell.ca) generated North American sales of over $100 million between its launch in June 1997 and June 1998 – results the company attributes to its overall direct-selling model, which it says allows consumers to ‘own the relationship’ and make purchases without the necessity of a computer reseller or other retail middleman.

In Canada, that strategy now generates sales of about $2.5 million a week from the e-commerce channel alone.