Connect The Dots
Online or brick-and-mortar? Tough question. But if you have a clear picture of your business, you already know the answer.
The smartest thing I've done in business is shutting down my
store and going exclusively online. Now I have a really neat
business. I love it," says Sherry Rand, 54, a Salisbury,
Massachusetts, retailer whose online store sells one thing and one
thing only: gear for cheerleaders. You want pompons in any style
and color? You want megaphones for leading cheers? Then you want to
know about PomExpress (http://www.pomexpress.com), where
Rand has conducted e-business in the two years since she shut the
doors on her brick-and-mortar operation. "Online, I don't have to carry the great overhead of a
store, and--from a quaint town in northern Massachusetts--I'm
selling globally. We get lots of orders from Europe, where
cheerleading is really picking up," says Rand, who adds that
she herself was a cheerleader through grade school and college. In
the years afterward, she sold cheerleader supplies as a
manufacturer's rep until she opened her own store. Now that
she's operating solely on the Web, she says, "This is a
great niche, and, on the Internet, I can conduct business wherever
I want to be." Another devoted dot.commer: Nancy Zebrick, 46, the onetime owner
of a traditional travel agency in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, who
launched a Web site in 1995 to complement her storefront. In early
1998, Zebrick decided the online operation had so many strengths
going for it, she shut her brick-and-mortar store. Content Continues Below
"The profits aren't there in a B-and-M travel agency.
Online is much more profitable," she says. "The gross
profit margins [per sale] are lower online, but we make it up in
volume because we can sell nationally, in fact
internationally," says Zebrick. Once her focus became
exclusively online, her Web business took off--so much so that in
late 1998, Zebrick plunged deeper into the Internet by merging her
agency with online travel superstore 1travel.com (http://www.onetravel.com), where she
now owns a slice of the company and serves as director of leisure
sales. "If you believe in the Internet--and I do--this is a
great place to do business." Egghead.com Inc. would agree. An early leader in storefront
software retailing--it staked out its turf back in 1984 and
promptly won significant brand awareness--Egghead hit tough times
in the mid-'90s as it faced both big-box retailers, such as
Best Buy and CompUSA, who carried more titles and often discounted
deeply, and a crush of new Web-based software retailers, from
Beyond.com (http://www.beyond.com) to Buy.com
(http://www.buy.com). Staring at
dwindling sales and the mounting costs of running traditional
retail stores, Egghead threw in the towel and closed its real-world
shops in early 1998 to concentrate exclusively on online retailing
at http://www.egghead.com
where, says the company, it now has over one million customers.
Robert McGarvey is Entrepreneur's "Web
Smarts" and "Staff Smarts" columnist.
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