Synergy between on line and classic retails

At the early age of Internet, people was considering this tool was so powerful it will bring the end of the traditional retailers. No waiting line, large range of choice, fast and easy way to shop, and also low prices were arguments that Internet retailers will become the king of the commercialization.

But it appears that there were problems. in the end of the 90s, Toys"r"us could not face the demand of its customers and could not deliver presents before christmas day. The supply chain is now stonger. And as retailers had hard time to turn profitable, the traditional commerce showed it was still actual.

But nowadays we can see a real synergy between on line and off line retails. Most of the retailers own an on line retail, such as best buy, or wall mart. But not only that, some of the leaders of the e business industry starts to have an off line presence. Among them, e bay that opened boutique to receive and send packages, and european leaders as pixmania.com, grosbill.com have opened their stores.

The synergy is hard to get, because most of the time, there is a competition that is installed between the website and the stores. Employees of the store thinks that the websites steal them some of their sales. But that is not exactly true.

It appeared a lot of customers were seeking for information on the web and then buying in stores, because they did not trust the Internet media. On the other hand, some other people were getting inside store to get the information with specialized salesperson, and then buying it at home because they had better prices on the Internet. Therefore, we can talk about synergy.

I wanted to talk about that synergy as I recently received this article. It goes beyond this synergy and explain why so many of the internet actors are opening stores. It appears that people who seeks on line information and buy in stores spend more in store than people who order on line. Another thruth is that mostly on line clients spend more than retail clients.

Therefore it is important for a retailer to work on the synergy, and also to offer different distribution channels to become complete.