Most of the material about creating a Web site for your business or about using the Net seems to assume that you’re going to create a separate Net business. Most likely you’re not going to do that. The odds are that you’ve got a retail store or two that draws on a local trading area. You can start a new Net business if you want, but you’ll probably do better by using the Net to support your local store business.
There are only three reasons that you’ll want a Web site for your store and they all relate to helping improve your long term competitive advantage and profitability. A Web site can help you do several things that will help your business even if you never sell a thing from the site. But a Web site can also help you improve your core business.
To start off, you have to understand the basics of how and why folks use the net to find local merchants. There are three basic components.
Pay attention, because this material isn’t covered in most of the article that you read.
Once you’ve got the basic principles, you need to apply them so that you can do the two things you want to do in retail
