We know that many of you also have a brick-and-mortar store in addition to your e-commerce site. The purpose of this thread is to help us understand the particular challenges you face so that we can improve our software for you.

• What are the benefits of running both a physical store and online store?
• What are the biggest challenges with running an online store and physical store?
• How has MonsterCommerce helped you overcome these challenges?
• If we could do one thing to make it easier for you to manage both your online store and physical store, what would it be?

Thanks for your insights!

Jeff

A POS interface

Keeping inventory levels current.

To be honest it is getting to the point where there are no benifits to running a physical store. When you can make more money clicking a mouse then breaking your back it kind of makes you wonder.


Overhead of a physical store can be significantly larger then an online store. Trying to juggle our online customers and our local customers can be a hassle sometimes, but maybe its the nature of our business.


Keeping the costs low on the online overhead. Also having great customer support when something goes wrong.


One thing? ...uh ...send some of those tech support junkies out here to help run our physical store.

wackyjazz, what do you use for POS? how do you track inventory today?

We currently do not have POS system (researching) but needs to be our next major purchase. For inventory, we use QB, though it is some what limited. What I would like is to use the website database for my inventory, then if something is sold from the store, it would remove it from inventory. For me, it is much more important to make sure my inventory is correct on the website than it is in the store.

We also came to the concluson that our physical store was not worth keeping. I was taking most of our time but accounting for only a small percentage of sales. Retail space is also very expensive. Warehouse space is less so.

Z- Jeff, in my humble opinion, the question MonsterCommerce needs to be asking is this: "How can we help you to integrate your inventories from multiple websites."

There are a lot of reasons why a person might want to open a second or third more specialized e-store that sells the same things as one's main e-store. Inventory management is a problem, though, because you have to divide your product's inventories among multiple stores. If you are selling Widget X at your hardware.com store, but you want to also sell it at widgets.com, you need to spread your widget X inventory between two sites. The problems of doing so are obvious, especially once you get many products.

This is a long winded way of saying that I believe the question is losing its relevance. My guess is that any poll of your clientele would reveal that we are more likely to have multiple e-stores than an e-store and a bricks and mortar store.

I would encourage MonsterCommerce to look at ways of allowing us to put multiple stores on one server that shares the same inventory. We would need to hide products store by store and also have different pricing options store-by-store.

One very expensive cart can do this. 3d-Cart also claims they can do this with custom programming. If you could offer these options you would be ahead of the curve and give yourself a lot of business. It would be a money maker for Network Solutions.

mcforum,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Your take is interesting because our research shows that ~40% of our clients have a physical store. That said, I do realize the many online merchants want to operate two online storefronts, so your point is well taken. That's an area we need to investigate since we don't support it today.

Thanks,

Jeff

40 percent! I have to admit that this surprises me. Do you happen to know how what percentage have multiple websites?

My guess is that if it were possible to run multiple stores from one database, you would get many people opening second, third, fourth stores. We would quickly open 3, each tailored for the search engines to a particular product line.

So would your product ID's, descriptions, etc all be the same if pulled from one database? I can see this causing problems with SEO. Just for the vote...I currently have 4 different shopping carts. Though they all sell some of the same products, none of them have more than 40% of the same items. For example, one site has 1200 items on it, while my newest site has just 88.

My biggest complaint that I have encountered is having to buy a second or third payment gateway. Yes, I realize I could process the orders offline, but I would rather my gateway do this for me.

Ideally you could have different descriptions for each site that draws from the product database. You would also want to have different pricing options. Many people would develop wholesale and retail versions of their site with this option. The different sites woudl have to use the same product ID that the MC system generates to control inventory, of course. I know this can be done because it is a feature offered elsewhere.

We've had a b/m store for 40+ years, so we've come to know our customers which makes it a pleasure and gives us roots to the community. On the flip side, e-commerce has allowed us to reach outside the Atlanta area to anywhere in the country.

E-sales are a very small part of our overall sales (but we're working on it). I've found that our existing customers quite often use our site as an on-line catalogue (they'll print the page and fax it in). I believe one reason for this is that personalization features in MC are quite limited, so it is just easier to fax in the wording. Specifically, we produce plaques, awards & trophies. Each item we sell needs some sort of engraving. It gets hairy when the customer wants to order multiple quantities and text boxes (which are limited to one row) won't allow for variable text. Many of our competitors have pretty sophisticated solutions; which even if MC offered as an add-on would be worth paying for.

Another obstacle we're trying to overcome is pricing. Many of our items include a limited number of characters. When on-line, if the customer goes over the limit, then we have to call them back after they place the order and advise them of the adjusted price.

What the web has done for us is to allow us to reinvent ourselves. We can now offer higher priced items to corporate buyers that our walk-in traffic could not afford. (It's a lot less effort to produce 2 $40 plaques than it is to produce 8 $10 trophies)

Thank you for your interest

Sean Mahoney
www.SuburbanCustomAwards.com

What would be great is to incorporate a front end (POS) into the Monstercommerce site to allow for all in store orders to be processed through the same checkout as the e-store. The front end would allow for quick orders to be processed versus filling in all customer information while still allowing for the processing of the credit card information through the same gateways.

Let me begin by thanking you for caring about what has been by far the most difficult aspect of our relationship with M-C. It is by far the number 1 reason we frequently ask if this is the platform of our past or our future?/


We have the ability with our 38+ year old Physical store to distinguish ourselves from the new to the business garage based ecommerce store. The experience and knowledge of our staff concerning products is much richer. This can be leveraged into our online store. I don't know any pure ecommerce players that can claim to have served their customer base for more than 30 years.

The benefit is that the physical store provides a great test environment for products. You can liquidate slow moving products easier in the storefront and only bring online, proven products. Since we run both on a single inventory, web stock backs up the store floor and the store floor backs up the web inventory. We have improved retail turns of product significantly without increasing the total investment in inventory.

One great advantage of having both a retail and etail store is that when the retails store is closed the etail is open. We do find that in the retail store, there is a customer base that will never become online shoppers, but having an online store, those that will shop online can still shop with us. It is the "Shop local" applied to an online store.

I agree with Sean of Suburban trophy about being able to offer higher priced items online that have limited potential to your store customers. Our example is that online we sell rugs which we have drop shipped for us. We show one in the store and have sales material for the rest. 80% of that products sales are online and 20% of sales are in the store. We have one display item but the web site gives us 80% more sales of that itme than we would get with the store alone.

One advantage of the physical store is it serves the last minute customer better. The customer stopping by on the way to the wedding looking for a gift. They have 30 minutes to shop and then they need to be there or they will be late. No form of online shipping meets that need.


Maintaining a clean single inventory that effectively services both. Lack of effective integration between web sales and store sales. Basically the inability to bring MC web sales and customers directly into our larger more robust Store DB.

Not letting the in-person / phone demands of the physical store suck up all the time, energy and other resources.


Honestly Not much help from MC here. I had a glimmer of hope when the DP5 was released based on SQL and storing information locally on our hard drive. I anticipated using the DP5 data and a custom build bridge to bring orders in RMS. After the first release of DP5 nothing more, no additional inprovements or adapters for external systems. Very disappointing.

I have been massivly frustrated by lack of integrations options offered by M-C (excluding stone edge). When I tried to take initiative in July my email and phone calls to the person at M-C supposedly in charge of partner development were ignored. That erroded my confidence that MC is interested in where my store is going. I had already identified the contact person at a potential integration partner that could help bridge the M-C / RMS gap and open up the tens of thousands of RMS customers as potential M-C Customers. I would still love to see this fly. (M-C Staff PM me if you want the email)


DON'T MAKE YOUR OWN POS! Build a better set of tools so that developers can create the necessary bridges to various POS Systems. If you try to build a great POS side for th cart, it will fall short of the robust abilities of more developed existing POS systems.

Presently we have 1 physical store and 3 online stores all working from the same inventory. We use Microsofts RMS for our store and order processing. It has tens of thousands of instalation worldwide, a fantastic developer community, shipping directly from the POS and a number of great, helpful independent add-ins. If M-C tried to build a POS for me it would be years an years before it would be at the level of the tools I have today. And the tools I have today would be better by then.

Stick to your strength, build the best cart in the world and build fantastic partnerships with the best in each of the other aspects, warehouse order processing, POS, Inventory management, Shipping...

Wordman,

You do make some good points about not developing their own POS and I do agree that a partnership should be developed with a leader in the market but still would need to develop some bridge between the two. I think that a very good long term partnership should be developed instead of some of these partnerships I have seen that change to often.

I would also love to hear more about your POS, maybe in a different thread. Detailing some of the pros and cons to using Microsofts POS.

HAHA, I thought he meant POS = piece of ****.

Guess he really meant point of sale...;)

I would like a phone order interface as well as some type of interface between the brick and mortar pos inventory and the online inventory. This is my first thought. Thanks

FYI - The Stone Edge Order Manager (www.StoneEdge.com/OrderManager.htm) has an optional Point of Sale system that can be fully integrated with your MonsterCommerce store. There is also a screen for entering orders that arrive by phone, mail, etc. All three pull from the same inventory, and changes in quantity-on-hand that occur at the POS or manual order screens, or from dealing returns & exchanges, receiving new inventory, etc. are sent to your MonsterCommerce store automatically. You can read about our POS screen in our Knowledge Base at: http://www.stoneedge.com/help/OM_DOC/POS/POS_Screen.htm

If you have any questions, please feel free to give us a call.

I'm glad we are asked these questions! We have been contemplating moving out of MC and outsource a team of programmers to build a new e-commerce site for us because there is simply no interface between our POS system and MC!

Our biggest time-wasters are:
1.Inventory: Keeping it up-to-day and in sync w/ physical store
2.Pricing: We have different pricing for online and physical store, updating prices and costs takes a lot of time.

To sum up: DOUBLE ENTRY is the problem right now

I would like to see a robust "Export" orders function in MC (or in Dataport) that can export inventory changes (items sold) in a .csv file. We can then import that into our POS system on a regular basis to keep inventory data current (and vise versa).

I hope MC version 7.x will contain an "import price" function so any price changes can be done once then imported into MC in a simple step.