According to Cyber's Senior Vice President Barry Gordon, it's important for companies today to become involved in the eCommerce aspect of business because, as industry experts have noted, if you have a loyal Internet shopper who trusts your brand, that customer tends to spend 40 percent more in your stores than they used to. Gordon adds that retailing today is often described as a three-legged milking stool, with each leg representing brick and mortar, catalog, and online sales. All three give you balance, he notes. The folks in the dot-com world who are struggling today, are doing so because they don t have all three pieces of the total retail structure as we do. A convergent strategy, or selling through multiple channels, allows us to serve our customers better than if we just had a store, or just a catalog.
Smart retailers understand that it takes a click and mortar approach.
We can t carry every available music CD in our store inventory. In the stores, we might sell the top 100 CDs, and online sell everything else. This keeps the sale in-house. We looked at the businesses that fit neatly into the same family and have absorbed them in to our Cyber operation, says Gordon. The Exchange Catalog is the foundation of Cyber and is a strong seller on the Internet.