The Next Wave of E-CommerceBlueport.com

If you're in charge of store operations, you may not know what to think about ecommerce integration, or how to present it to your commissioned sales team.

You may ask yourself, ‘Won't my sales staff lose customers to the web?’

This is a common concern, and one that sales managers should address with their teams prior to implementing a multi channel e-commerce strategy. The reality is that for many retail categories, especially big-ticket, the greatest benefits of going online happen in stores. This may sound counterintuitive, but because big-ticket retail is fundamentally local and stores play a critical role. E-commerce stores become a powerful tool to help stores compete in their local markets rather than a national channel that bypasses them.

Online efforts serve to drive store traffic, generate leads and consummate online transactions — cost effectively and measurably. Many retailers have found that this to be true. Specifically, for every online order, 5 or 6 directly trackable orders are placed in stores by people who first registered online. And these are only the customers who provided us with their names online — the real impact in your stores will actually be an order of magnitude larger.

With a managed ecommerce solution, your stores gain customers of the best kind — educated consumers who have found exactly what they want online, and simply want to see the item in person in your stores and complete the transaction with a live person.