Circuit City Stores Inc. (NYSE: CC) has apparently joined the 21st century as it has announced it will feature the same retail pricing on its website as in its physical stores. While this is hardly newsworthy, it does point out an area that retailers consistently get wrong when it comes to the customer experience: making sure the experience is the same regardless of which buying channel the consumer lands at.

Why Circuit City would announce something as pointless as price continuity across its stores and website smacks of some kind of holiday desperation for the upcoming sales season that has already started in all reality. While it's not the only retailer to have different pricing on its website and its retail locations, it's probably one of the largest.

Circuit City marketing head Jeff Maynard told the AP that "it's no secret this holiday season is probably one of the most important ones in our history as a company, and with these equities in place, we feel pretty good about it." From the translation booth, Maynard seems to be saying this is a "do or die" holiday selling season, and that the company may be in slightly better or absolute worse shape come January, after holiday sales figures have been released. It's hard to imagine Circuit City building any kind of good trust by doing something like syncing prices along its various sales channels, but perhaps that's the only remaining chess move the company has.

Although Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC) reported a horrible December in terms of sales and profits, the second-largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. was one of the top three online consumer electronics retailers in December, trailing leader Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY), but ahead of online auction giant eBay, Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY).

Nielsen ratings figures put unique web visitors like this: Best Buy at 23.99 million, and Circuit City at 19.61 million. Figures for eBay weren't available (as some separate categories have to be measured together), but the real news was that Circuit City's December 2007 website traffic growth increased more than 20% from 2006's level. Best Buy's December 2007 visitor count rose only 9%.

Why couldn't Circuit City capitalize on such an impressive amount of unique holiday retail traffic? The failure of the retailer to make any sales gains this past holiday season just seems endemic of multiple failures and problems the company has at this time. While we wait on Circuit City CEO Phil Schoonover to be sacked from the corner office, perhaps a lingering, potential sale of the company will force the issue and Circuit City can get back to business. Profitable business, that is.

Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC) is striving to do what it can to lure customers back into its stores in the face of rapidly declining sales and the public relations backlash of firing 3,400 workers so that they could be replaced with cheaper workers. Well, the company is still not sure it is on the right path, and CEO Phil Schoonover must be one of the sweatiest leaders in the retail world right now. If I owned CC shares, vocal disapproval would be an inadequate way to describe the position I would take. How about you?

What will Circuit City do to reinvigorate itself and its sales? A piece of that strategy seems to be enhancing its Firedog services (that name is, well, lame); the retailer is moving fast and furious to make sure all customers know about its PC services, home theater installation services and more mobile installation services offered through Firedog.com. As the focus moves away from retail transactions and into more of a services approach, this must mean that the retail electronics field is lacking in margin and is roughly commoditized. Yep, I can see that. Competitor Best Buy Inc. (NYSE: BBY) saw this quite a while ago.

Circuit City's Schoonover said last week that the retailer must move beyond selling TVs and move into the arena of selling multiple pieces of entertainment gear together as some kind of integrated solution for the consumer. Sounds like a plan: get customers to buy multiple pieces of equipment like DVD players, home theater receivers and game consoles and then sell them a services package from Firedog to get it all connected and working together since the manufacturers make it impossible to do that for yourself. Do I hear conspiracy here? Just kidding . . . maybe.