By Eric Fairbanks

That the Web is reinventing retail is old news. That even the smallest retailer has to be in the game might not be. TRIO designs over 100 stores per year from the ground up. We advise almost every retailer we work with that they should start building a website as soon as they start building their store. Why? Because their customers will expect it and their sales will suffer without it.

With the rise of ecommerce, the retail landscape has been completely remade. While outsourcing and globalization were already commodifying just about every product and niche, the Web accelerated the process exponentially. The Web puts expert opinions, buyer’s reviews, and, on some cases, wholesale pricing at the consumer’s fingertips. Moreover, the virtual marketplace puts comparison shopping but a mouse-click away. As has been noted, somewhat ruefully, by retail experts everywhere, it’s now a consumer’s market. The consumer can now get what she wants, when she wants it, at a good price, and in a color other than black.

In the event you think that your niche is impervious to the Web-ification of retail, think again, this time of Zappos.com. Zappos.com was born in 1999, back when the thought of selling shoes online ran against conventional online market-think at the time. Sure, you could sell something that didn’t require sizing sight unseen like books, but shoes? No way. Folks needed to try shoes on, walk around a bit, and talk to a salesman. In 2005, Zappos.com saw gross sales of $370 million. The point is, no matter how obscure or particular your product or service is, you’re facing the digital competition.

To remain viable, any retailer needs a website to go with the bricks-and-mortar enterprise. The scale depends on your needs. A more modest investment might be a simple branding web presence that runs under ten pages and includes information about your products or services and contact info. To save money, you can use one of the website templates supplied by your web-hosting company. (Look up “web-hosting” in a search engine.) Such a site, with various traffic analytics, will cost you under $20 a month to maintain. It is money well-spent, and the return on investment is orders of magnitude greater than traditional marketing channels. Exposure to your product now transcends physical geography.

At the other end of the scale is a robust, fully-enabled e-commerce site with an online catalog and a shopping cart. For such a website, the sky is the limit when it comes to budget. Customers can view and purchase product through a completely automated process. But this sells your product directly to millions of Web surfers worldwide 24/7. To make your online business really hum, you should develop a marketing campaign that includes banners ads and pay-per-click advertising. This isn’t inexpensive, but the pay-off is substantial. You’ll have to staff up to handle all the business.

Though e-commerce is only a fraction (some say 2%) of overall retail sales, it is safe to say that the future of retail is digital commerce and marketing. If you’re not on the bandwagon, you’ll soon be left in the dust.

At the very least you’ll need a basic website that tells the consumer who you are, where you are, and what you’re about. We’ll call this a branding website. The branding website gives you online visibility to the millions of people surfing the Web every day. They learn the basic information about you and your business and how to contact you. As important, they will, from the site’s look and feel, start to form an emotional association with your company—this is branding. That’s why, no matter how small an investment a site such as this might be, it is vital that you build a site that looks good.

It will cost you a couple of hundred dollars to have someone such as a Web-hosting service build you a simple branding website from scratch. These services will create a website for a nominal fee and then will maintain it for as little as ten dollars a month. From your end, a website like this takes absolutely no special technical knowledge, and it’s the cheapest way to go. With this package you can expect to receive a few personal e-mail accounts. On a small PR level, it’s far better to hand a potential customer a business card with a business email address, yourname@yourbusiness.com, rather than a “home” email address. In this price range, you’ll also have the option of including basic click tracking statistics. These analytics will tell you how many people view your site every day, and what pages they’re looking at, and what sites are linking to yours, among other things.

At the other end of the spectrum is a robust e-commerce site crammed with features. The more functionality, the more it costs. A site like this is intended to sell your entire catalog of product and services directly and seamlessly as possible. The catalog would include an image of the product with the specs and pricing and pertinent shipping information. Your customer could click on the product and buy it directly off the website using a credit card. The website would then automatically send you, the owner, an email telling you an order had been placed. The website also sends an email to your customer confirming the order. Built right, your website orders can even be integrated into your company’s inventory/fulfillment software. If you run out of an item, and someone tries to order it off your website, they will be automatically notified that it is out of stock. Of course, all the financial transactions are automated. Funds are deposited directly into your account. A site this sophisticated functions as a virtual storefront, and sells product 24/7 worldwide.

The virtual storefront website is competing in a very crowded marketplace. If you’re putting out the money for a virtual storefront, it makes sense to advertise online. One of the most fundamental ways to advertise online is through search engines such as Google or Yahoo!. You can buy “keywords” so that if a potential customer types the keyword “maple syrup” into Google, a small text ad linking back to your maple syrup site will appear next to the search results. A popular keyword can send literally thousands of new customers to your site. Take heed: A mis-managed keyword campaign can end up costing you a lot in a very short time with little to show for your investment. Study up or engage an e-commerce consultant beforehand. On the other hand, a keyword campaign properly executed will do things for your bottom line impossible to find in any traditional bricks-and-mortar (physical storefront) improvement.

Other forms of online advertising are closer to traditional advertising and, as such, their underpinnings are little easier to understand. Banner ads (you’ve seen them) can also be effective. These ads typically contain a few lines of text, an eye-catching graphic, and lead to your website when clicked on. Placing a simple graphic banner ad on a commercial website popular with your customers is a very efficient way to advertise. In fact, the primary difference between traditional advertising and online advertising is efficiency. Whereas quantifying just how effective a dollar spent is in generating sales has long been the bugaboo in traditional advertising—if you put up a billboard, how can you track how many sales it’s responsible for?—the unique nature of online advertising enables you to quantify your efforts. Tracking metrics allow you to identify an advertising impression through the final sale. Underperforming keyword and banner ad campaigns can be quickly identified and corrected. In cyberspace, advertising ROI and efficiencies have never been clearer.

The online environment lends itself to affiliation and partnership programs, and these are free and definitely worth pursuing if you have gone the virtual storefront route. It’s essentially free advertising and can pay big dividends. There are other avenues to attracting more eyeballs to your website, including publishing a newsletter, sending email postcard ads, and posting how-to articles such as this one.

While investing in a Web presence, time and money both, may seem daunting, the potential pay-off is astounding. And the hard reality is that a website is now as essential a retail tool as the cash register. Why not plug it in?

How to start? TRIO Display started small. First, we built a branding site to display our design work. Then we added a few pages of e-commerce. Then we started a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign with Yahoo! and later, Google. Now we have a full-time staff that just works on the site as well as a team of trained associates answering sales calls. TRIO’s owner, Jeff Grant, comments, “If you had told me five years ago that we would be receiving thousands of orders annually off of a website, I would have questioned your mental state.” Now Jeff spends considerable time just keeping current on the newest innovations in Web marketing.

Jeff’s advice: Talk to someone who is a Web marketer first. Get their opinions, advice and any references for website builders. Then talk to the site builders and potential web marketing teams. After you get over the sticker shock determine if you want to hire outside consultants or simply hire good people full time and let them build and monitor the site for you.

One thing further: Don’t let the technology scare you. As Grant states, ” It ain’t brain surgery.” I’m 55 years old, don’t have a tech background and other then using design programs, can just barely navigate my way around a computer. Our website worked way beyond our expectations, and I can say the same for many of my clients.”
Our suggestion: Embrace the Web and the profits will follow.