Physical cigar shops have several advantages and disadvantages. The neighborhood cigar shop is typically small and privately owned. The stock is often small and the store stocks cigarettes, pipe tobacco, and accessories. The customers typically come from the surrounding area and will not travel far to reach a store.
Customers however are able to handle the products to determine quality.
Cigar shops located in malls have high overhead costs due to high mall rents. In addition, due to the small size of most shops their inventory may be small. Competition from online cigar shops is huge. A search on Infoseek yielded 10,523,382 matches. To make the competitor analysis more manageable we chose 6 sites from a search on Infoseek and Yahoo .