Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
Has anyone made this kind of move? I'd be interested to know about your experiences
Bottom line is that we're in a small rural town, a relatively economically depressed area, so the business is really slow off the street. I built the website to supplement it.
What we're finding is that
1) Online, it seems to build buyer confidence in that this is a REAL location with REAL people that you can call. Business hours posted. Phone number and address. You can follow the links and see the store. We are competing against companies with 10X our inventory (with really poor sites) but they are online only. We're guessing this is why they buy from us and not competitors offering the same items, and often for less.
2) The online presence has completely enhanced the store business. As you know, local advertising is very expensive and not all that effective. For newspapers to work, you have to run ads every week. One or two here and there won't do it. Same with TV commercials (although we've just jumped into that.)
We have people walk into the store and say "I never knew you were here! I typed in [product] [geo-area] on [search engine] and there you were, so I came in." We are reaching the local market via the Internet, with almost zero local advertising! So we just cut a rather expensive local TV commercial - that actually brought a sale the very next day.
Now, remember I said "economically depressed." I am not understating this fact. Every other retailer in this town is on very hard times, businesses come and go and the average survival of a retailer is about a year. My wife has been in business for two years and in the green EVERY MONTH - and better yet, all profits are turned back into the business, so she is GROWING. She is really raising eybrows in this town. Now if she could just start writing herself checks I'd be golden. :-D
We can only attribute this to the interaction of her click with her mortar, click and mortar is vital for us.
Its not as easy as you think becareful.
Why the heck would you want to try that?
It is all about numbers, in clicks you have a potential 3 billion uniques, in bricks you have at best 100,000 and at worst dozens!
Think clicks, bricks is going to be hard to work in the next 20 years!
