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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?"
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
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
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.
If people think like you 75.43% of the sites on the net will close! :-)
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.
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