Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

Let's do a little creative writing experiment and try to bolster that sagging "Ecommerce" category just a bit. I realize topics related to ecommerce hosting are not exactly infused with a great deal of excitement. Nothing to do with ecommerce really brings to mind the strident, bellicose tones of the man pitching a monster tuck show on "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday." What I'm saying is that it is kind of hard to get excited about it, I suppose.

So, I'll try to mix it in with something I'm a bit more interested in, say... comic books. Hardly a surprise to anyone reading the blog with remote regularity, I would hope. The lesson we'll look at here is how some comic shops, which are basically a fairly "niche" industry in the first place, are expanding their reach online, and doing so in a way that brings a unique facet of their walk-in business to online customers. This will hopefully provide some inspiration to other owners of the proverbial "brick and mortars" to realize the benefits of selling not only to the local community, but the world at large.

The comic industry suffered a bit of a "recession" in the late 90's through the early part of this century. I'm sure something in that one semester of macroeconomics I took would help explain why this happened, but I'm a little fuzzy on the details of anything I learned in that one. It was a pre-req for the "Government" part of my dual-major, so I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. I do remember liking macro- a lot more than micro-, but that may have been the different professors.

The (eventual) point being the comic shop herd has been thinned a bit recently. Comics themselves aren't as available as they once were in larger "chain" stores like Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other chiefly "bookseller" outlets. In the heady days of the early 90's you could probably find a comic rack in those stores; not so easily today. That means customers who want their comics locally need to find a "direct outlet"- a comic book store.

Even the lack of competition from larger chain outlets wasn't enough to assure everyone's survival. What do you do if your local market isn't providing the sales to get you through? You head out on the web. A number of brick and mortar comic shops started selling their wares online, moving beyond what the local market would provide to ship to anywhere UPS, FedEx, or the USPS could find on the globe.

The key was to offer the online customers the same kind of "experience" the walk-ins received. Basically, most any comic store will offer a kind of pick-up "subscription" service, where in customers can request a title (or group of titles, usually) be set aside for them every month the new issue comes out. Instead of combing the new release racks every Wednesday, they simply pick up all the titles to which they subscribe from their "box".

The shop itself runs the program and stocks the boxes when the new issues arrive. Everything is handled in-store, and the customer merely requests titles be added or removed from their box or subscription list. Ultimately, though the system requires a bit of extra work on the part of the shop, it provides a courtesy service that customers appreciate and builds a long term relationship with the customer.

Recreating this kind of system online helped assure success for a number of comic outlets. Through various custom-designed systems, shops mimic the in-store subscription process by creating database driven applications that allow web users to sign-up, provide payment information, and then select titles to add to their subscription list. These titles are then collected for the online user and shipped at an interval the users request. What that interval is may vary with the shop, but options between 1 week and 1 month are standard.

So, there's a fairly concrete example of how a brick and mortar took what was essentially a pretty direct "online mail order" option and layered it with something that regular comic customers could immediately understand. Customers who do subscriptions with comic stores via the web do incur higher costs in terms of shipping, but for someone who's not in easy range of a store, or someone who simply wants to skip the store, it's a convenient option.

Does your local business provide a product or service in a unique fashion that could be recreated on the web? Perhaps you customize existing products and didn't think it possible to sell "personalized" items on the web. Shopping carts are pretty powerful things theses days, and there is certainly one that would allow you to do just that. Creating it from scratch is also possible, if you're willing to invest in a good developer.

Even if your unique methods or services can't be replicated on the web, or there's little inherently unique about how you sell, say, handbags, that doesn't mean the web won't help you reach more customers than those who drop by on a Saturday afternoon. Those who already have the local shop are in a unique position to benefit from the web in ways someone starting from scratch may not. Take advantage to the opportunity the net provides to bring your products and services to the world.

SREPS Creep

Hey, look at that, I wrote an entire blog without an outbound Wikipedia link. I suppose I could have linked up "comic book", but that's really pushing it. Of course, as the saying vaguely goes, should one call down the thunder, be ready for the boom. I mentioned in my "Sour Grapes" post about how it was fairly easy for me to defend Google's passion for Wikipedia since I didn't actually compete with them. Well, naturally, ye ole Wiki popped up on the front page of one of our main phrases a few weeks ago, even bumped us briefly before falling back a few spots.

Time will tell. It is reasonably peeving the exact phrase doesn't appear anywhere on the page for which it's ranking. Still, it's a very obviously related term, so I am not surprised by this development. I'll stand by my earlier comments. Even if the 'pedia bumps us off permanently, we'll still be one of the first results that actually sells what people are looking for.