Slashdot Mirror
Should Every Retail Outfit Have A Webpage?
Kaz Riprock asks: "A few months ago, I was looking for a store where I could purchase AbraCabubble, a hard candy with gum center made by Brach's. I figured most manufacturers have a website with product locator and the closest store to me with Brach's bulk candy would do. After an hour or two probing the web with Google (like you needed the link), I was only able to come up with a few stock projections. This was amazing to me, because when I set out to find even the most obscure facts on the web, I usually don't come back quite so empty-handed, especially when looking for a presence for the third largest candy manufacturer in the US. Since then, they've put up a website. It's true that a business could get by without a web presence in this day and age, but what's the likelihood? What's the largest business that you sought lately to find an official page on and came up without anything to show for your efforts? Have they since come around and put a page up? I think it'd be interesting to keep a page (or even use this article) of companies that you should not expect to find a page on, so that at the very least, you'd find that page and know to stop looking. Thoughts?"
As the accessibility expert said earlier today; every company should have a website. For example, a clinically obese person may not be able to physically get to the candy store. Therefore under the Americans with Disabilities act, the candy store is obliged to provide candy some other way.
It all depends on your target market, to an extent, and how much your business can be helped by getting information out via the web. With the number of people getting "online" increasing, I'm sure we will see more and more companies that don't already have a presence on the 'net, get one.
The other side of this, though, is that the majority of people aren't online yet and this idea that a company couldn't survive without a 'net presence smacks of elitism.
Having a website for every store would be both pointless and a waste of money. For most stores or the third largest producer of bulk candy, you'll have a good idea of where it is before going online. For the most part, businesses with web sites have them to sell their goods online, but do you really want to buy your candy online and then pay shipping and wait a week to get it when you can go to a mall or grocery store to get the same thing for the same price? Having a website would cost money, and like any other business, they'd pass this expense on to you. Just my $.02 tpearson
My mother was looking for a specific article of baby clothing she saw at Wal-Mart (do not get me started - I boycott the place personally, but it is hard to convince new grandparents). They did not have the size she wanted, so she enlisted my help to find the clothes on the Internet.
The brand was McBaby. Apparently McDonald's (another non-favorite of mine) and Wal-Mart (horror of horrors, up there with Microsoft in my opinion) came together to create a line of infant clothing called, appropriately enough, McBaby.
These are two huge companies in the U.S., including the largest.
Wal-Mart does not carry clothing on their website, and a search of McDonald's turned up barely a reference to the clothing line.
In short, the only reference I found to it was on used infant clothing sites.
If you want to domain-sit something, I would suggest mcbaby.com.
I do not suppose you can get much bigger than a joint McDonald's and Wal-Mart partnership.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
It's true that a business could get by without a web presence in this day and age, but what's the likelihood?
Well, I think your story makes it obvious that some businesses get by just fine without a website. The third largest candy maker in the country seems to have held its market share without some frivolous "where to find our candy" web application that would probably cost more to build and maintain than it could possibly bring in in revenues.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Except most businesses these days implement their websites so poorly. I want to be able to see the inventory of my local stores on the web and comparison shop so I don't have to run around, but no stores do that.
The big problem with giving a list of retailers, is that it is too hard to know who is selling your product. My company sells to Wal-Mart, and we ship to a distribution center; where the product goes from there, I have no Idea. If I sell to small retailers, how do I know when they stop selling my product? The closer that you get into a specialty buisness, the less this becomes a problem i.e. I offer an exclusive product to dealers, and I have sales reps. The problem is that most products are not specialty, and the product can travel unusual paths to retailers.
A business web page is not for advertising. Get a clue. Retail store? I want your hours, I want to know what you have in stock and how much it costs so I know whether to go an hour out of my way to pick something up from your store today. Hardware manufacturer? Give me specs, make it easy for me to buy your stuff, and I'll cut out the middleman and give you more of my money. But I don't give a shit about your branding or your partners or your fucking synergy. It's just a few little bits I want, the basic stuff of doing business with you.
I kept looking for Visa's website, but for some reason always ended up at evisa.com's site... which isn't quite what I was looking for.
Oh well. I finally found it at www.visa.com
When I clicked over to bath and body works to buy a gift for my fiance (this scented soap that she loves) a few weeks ago there wasn't anything there except a single placeholding "coming soon" page. Looks like they've put something else out there now, but I would have expected to be able to order online, have it shipped and never have to set foot in the store. Oh, well, brick and mortar doesn't scare me, it's just that I don't get off campus much.
I think it is essential if you are any type of business to have a website. it would be myopic to think that just because you are not an internet savvy person yourself that others would not find a website useful. As a developer, I commonly come up against the internet nay-sayers, who just don't see its benefits. Or, which may even be worse, ask for things that they think is useful but just fail to understand their potential visitor. Even if it is simply an online brichure with contact details and an about us page, they can be a useful point of contact. And of course for b2b or ecommerce, well say no more, it is absolutely essential to have a web presence to attract more business.
If people think like you 75.43% of the sites on the net will close! :-)
Wow, what a boring Ask Slashdot. Allow me to introduce another, more interesting question.
What is your favorite candy? I love Zours!
"And like that
I've googled them before, but I can't find their catalogs anywhere online, I'm starting to wonder if they've gone out of business. Kinda sad. I miss going through their xmas catalogs and circling all the toys that I want to get.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Hmm. I have read some interesting responses to this so far. A couple of them basically were of the form, "I want to be able to see a store's inventory and pricing, so I can comparison shop. If you don't give me that information, I won't shop at your store." I think somebody else also called not having a web site for your store "myopic," but I could have mis-read that post.
Consider this question, though, from the point of view of the business owners. Having a web site, even just a brochure site, costs money. The only reason to do it is to drive sales, either indirectly (in the case of a brochure site) or directly (in the case of an e-commerce site). If the site doesn't drive sales, it's a waste of money and should be shut down.
Now, how many more widgets do you think WidgeCo would sell every year if they made comprehensive inventory and price information available on their web site? Three, maybe four? That hardly justifies the cost of keeping the web site up, much less the cost of developing it in the first place.
If web sites were free, I'd agree with your guys completely: everybody should have one, and it should have all the bells and whistles. But since they're not free, either to build or to operate, it just doesn't make any sense in a lot of cases.
I think, based on what I'm hearing in my segment of the market*, that more and more businesses are starting to realize this, and either scale their web sites back, take them down completely, or-- just the opposite-- investing in them to turn them into e-commerce profit centers. There's not really much of a sensible middle ground.
* I'm a partners in a fairly fancy-schmancy restaurant, and I'm a member of the local chapter of the association of professional chefs. At the last meeting, the conversation ended up on the topic of web sites. On one side of the table, you had some folks who had invested heavily in their restaurants' web sites, and who believed their business had improved because of it. On the other side you had the rest of us who were skeptical. None of the pro-web-site guys could offer any proof that their bookings had gone up because of their sites; over the same period of time, all of our bookings fluctuated by about the same amount, more or less. So it seemed to me, and some of the rest of us, that restaurant web sites are a big waste of time and money.
I write in my journal
I agree that having the so-called "1 degree of separation" that Microsoft's been advertising for the past several months is a good thing. However, it's very, very hard to do. I think Home Depot has in-store inventories, along with CompUSA. The catch with this is being able to link all of your store's POS (Point of Sale, not Piece of...) systems into a national network safely, securely, and inexpensively. To do this properly you need a properly designed infrastructure, and people there to support it. That's where companies like the various Microsoft vendors come in. If you pay them enough, they'll build and support the whole thing. If you pay them enough.
In all this talk about p2p and b2b, IT firms like MS seem to be forgetting b2c: "Business to Consumer."
Michael C. Hollinger
You know, this is a poser straight out of a certain module I took up last semester. My university is course extremely cyber-smitten; we have courses in (so-called) "New Media" - hypertext, cyberart and yes, "Themes in Internet Studies: Cyber Public Relations" (the module concerned), all fuelled by a 100 MBPS broadband connection and one of the world's largest wireless networks (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out where my university is). This, of course, is in stark contrast to the university from which I transferred; that had about 10 terminals with satellite uplink. You had to register internet browsing slots before hand, and boy, was competition for registration intense. (The name of this university too is an exercise for the reader)
The point of the whole matter is this:- I believe I've seen both internet-rich and internet-deprived worlds. My take on it:- everything depends on your target audience. If you're addressing a geographically-spread audience, the Web is your bestest bet, period. Cheap, near ubiquitous (unless you are in North Korea or Bhutan) and accessible. But, if on the other hand, you're manufacturing, say, durable-but-cheap-plastic chopsticks with Thai engraving, it's a good idea to focus on, perhaps, ads in the Bangkok Post and fliers at Sukhumvit Soi (that's downtown Bangkok).
Note that size might not be a factor in geographical spread; while I have no idea about your candy company, a company could possibly get most of its requests from a single metropolitan area and still grow in (pecuniary) size.
More than mere navel gazing.
A business does not need a web page. not even in this day and age.
.com bust.
Businesses are still build with brick-n-mortar buildings and with customers. The web is not a prerequisite of either.
The "if you build it, they will come" web page mentality was proven to be flawed with the
Besides, only retail stores and computer industry corporations will see the most customer benefit from the web. Manufacturers, suppliers, B2B outfits, warehouses, etc. have been and will continue to do just fine with out it.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I am clinically obese. I have to lay in bed most of the day. I rely on food delivery service for my very life. Without it I would starve. I have a hard enough time convincing food delivery agents to deliver to my bedroom instead of my front door which I can't get to. I would give my right leg for the ability to actually be able to get out and about and visit a candy store. Nothing funny about it.
That said, I think businesses grossly overestimate the value of marketing/demographic data they seem hell-bent on gathering these days. Not just businesses either. Whether you're purchasing goods or inquiring about a TV program, the fuckers on the other end of the wire are going to extract everything they can from you. How may terabytes are tucked away *every day* in SQL databases for name/address/e-mail address and phone number?
Tip for small businesses who are getting their web sites off the ground: you do not have to become an intelligence agency. Collect only relevant information for your business, go to every length possible to safeguard your customers' privacy, and stick to *your* business model, not some marketing sleezebag's.
It should be considered the same as a yellow pages entry or occasional newspaper ad. a simple page with the name, address, phone number and normal store hours along with a brief description of what types of things the store has is all that needed.
It should cost the store only a few hundred dollars up front for someone to create & host this for them as well as submit it to various business indices so that real search engines pick up on it.
I am much more likely to do business with a store that has a basic website than one whos existance goes unnoticed by search engines online.
Here (In NZ) I would like for stores to have some way for me to look up current prices on the web.
For example, recently when buying my ibook I found several stores which I could buy it through (on apple's website) and only one of those stores had a website. That meant that I was in a car to drive around the place to get prices (annoying to say the least).
Maybe i am obsessed with food or something, but i think all resturaunts should have their menu posted on the web. It jsut gets so annoying when you cant find that one place and it is almost dinner time.
i have more problems with companies that operate a website with no real contents.
My mother has a preschool. She runs it to exceptionally high standards and charges accordingly. It was fully booked before it even opened, and has a 2-year waiting list (If you want to send your kids there, you basically have to sign up as soon as they're born..) She doesn't have a website. Why would she want one?
Webpages with content are good - especially when you are looking for the specs of a particular component, sofa or pair of socks ... But webpages with just contact details are little frustrating.
... actually finding them can also be an art in itself. I guess approaches such as ShopCut help, but are limited by the obvious issues.
Of course
Actually there's another reason for a physical business - like a restaurant - to have a web site, which is to be found in the first place. Think of it as a yellow pages listing - I'm sure you have one of those!?
"Location based search" services on computers and cell-phones will increasingly be used instead of yellow pages to locate businesses.
For an open-source example look at:
mobilemaps.com
Instead of a flashy, expensive website, all it needs is a single page with a paragraph describing the type of restaurant and including an address, phone number, and opening hours.
What's actually a gas is all the small computer companies (mostly Mom 'n Pops) that think they can get by without a webpage in this day and age, or, almost as bad, with just a webpage that has their name on it, no directions to the store, and no catalog. It seems even computer companies can't "get it", and it strongly helps explain why there's an 80% new startup business failure rate.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Software is how I usually put it when speaking politely. The pregnant pause gets the meaning across quite nicely.
I guess if I were creating something that people in the tech sector want, yes, having a web page is important.
But, let's say you make custom wedding gowns or custom pepper grinders. While it would be nice to have a webpage, not everyone has the time/effort/money to do it.
There are some people out there who are artisans and can't operate a computer, but their craft is so great people are put on waiting lists.
This is all true. So, while it is convenient for us, it's not always convenient for them.
c.
I recently bought the new album from a band called Sigur Ros, an Icelandic band that just came through San Francisco. The band is somewhat pretentious, as many artists are, and refused to name the album or the songs, leaving you to interpret what the songs mean to you. Instead, the album simply has empty parenthesis on the cover. As a concept album, they wanted no text to appear on the CD sleeve, but they still had to give props to the production studio, mixers, former bandmate's sister's dog, etc... So all that appeared on the CD case was the URL Of course, the site contained all of the thank yous and credits. It seemed a lot more efficient to me, and gave them the freedom to express a lot more information about the compilation of the album and to present it in new ways. Also, the information only had to be recorded once, rather than remove a forest from the planet to release 1 CD. (Not that they were conservative with the number of leaves they used used in the booklet.) But it made me think that one day, all any product would need would be a URL. This would also allow the content to be dynamic if changes needed to be made. This would work for Twinkie ingredients, DVD extra features, or percent of post-consumer recycled materials used. Not that it would revolutionize anything, but packaging would be much less cluttered, and you would always know where to go to get product info. Of course for this to work, every retail outfit would have to have a web page.
I work for a small mineral exploration company. We use our website to disseminate information, provide an introduction to our projects, provide contact info and forms, collect data, etc. We don't allow advertising on the site, but we provide needed services in a place that has very few roads but is 1/5th the entire U.S. While there are print options, due to the widely varied and far-flung nature of our business, a web site is the most effective way for us to reach people. Yes, we tried some print advertising, and found that the webwork is more effective.
I have also done some side work, setting up webpage and sites for small businesses. I don't do it anymore, because too many people want something beyond their financial or technological reach, and then want to change the color of the border in the third box on page 13 and could I do that right now? I still believe a web presence is an effective way to communicate for any size or style of business, or politicians, or whomever, but with the conditioner that the pages not be done in some crappy app like frontpage, not be done by the business owner (even computer and web service co.s), and the goals and objectives are realistic.
It's not just small companies. Fry's Electronics has several large stores in California, Texas, Oregon, and Arizona. However, for a long time, the only website they had was frys.com, which only pointed to their ISP services. They had a link to the addresses of the brick and mortar stores, but that's all.
They've recently opened outpost.com, which finally gives people a way to purchase goods on-line. But it is still separate from the brick-and-mortar stores, in that it is strictly an e-commerce site. In fact, even though they have the Fry's Electronics logo on the site, I see no reference to the stores on the site (though I only looked for about 5 minutes). Contrast that to Best Buy or Circuit City, each of which has a store locator prominently located on their web site.
Yes! Every business should have a website!
;-)
By the way, I am available for web development at a very reasonable price for asp.net, j2ee, php and coldfusion...
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
The Brach's web site is suspiciously silent on the "What Happened to Helen Brach?" issue. I still suspect the butler.