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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?"
Then you'll be wanting Monkeymeat.com
HTH. HAND.
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
You forgot to bold one other word. should. It depends on whether or not the company sees an advantage of putting up a site. Does it generate revenue or is it a waste?
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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
Are you sure that the idea of a clinically obese person trying to get to a candy store isn't humor?
It's all going according to
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.
That's what I thought, too. I guess it could be insightful, but it made me laugh.
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.
The big problem with giving a list of retailers, is that it is too hard to know who is selling your product.
Then reverse the problem; let other online retailers submit their links to your website and "renew" periodically.
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! :-)
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.
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.
She could always raise her price to the point that she's still putting people on a waiting list and then make a website with the profits. The extra people drawn in (especially if she put up monitoring cameras so people could see their kids while they're at work...password it and things to keep out the freaks and pedophiles) and then that will draw in more people to her service (to replace those that left because of the rate increase). Then, she could bump it up just a bit more to hedge off a few others and now she's got a steady state of enough plus a few on waiting and the highest market price for that group...
It's called supply/demand economics.
Or she can collect whatever she's getting now and leave it at that. It's only a daycare.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Perhaps YOU missed the part about "raise your price until some people leave". Then you don't have to worry about a 2-year waiting list, because only those who want to pay top dollar for top dollar service will still keep coming. THEN, you put up the website and camera to build back up the clientele pool to a 2-year waiting list.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Software is how I usually put it when speaking politely. The pregnant pause gets the meaning across quite nicely.
Why are you getting down on /.?
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...