E-Commerce Overtaking Retail Shops

There is often a competitive mentality between online retailers and those who operate out of a brink-and-mortar shop. The brick-and-mortar shops offer face-to-face customer service for those who have questions about products, while the online stores offer a large selection, often at a lower price. Whether customer's prefer ordering gear online of buying it in a local shop, there is no question that the Internet still has a large role to play in shaping the ski industry.


A recent article written on SkiingBusiness.com tackled this topic, interviewing some people who own businesses have seen success in the e-commerce side of the ski retail industry. The main consensus was 'It takes time and effort to see a significant return, so don't rush an e-commerce site'.


SEO:

Amy Dannwolf, vice president of Powder7, an online ski retailer based in Golden, Colo., helped develop the Powder7 website from the ground up. She says effective search engine optimization, or SEO, should be an e-tailer’s first priority when building a website. Good SEO practices are what propel a website to the top of a results page when an online shopper enters a query in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. But achieving optimal SEO takes time.

“It requires real know-how,” Dannwolf says. “There are a lot of key components.”

These components that she mentioned range from writing clean code, to using the right key words in page headers.

There’s even a fine line between having too much content on an e-commerce site and not having enough, says Steve Kopitz, owner of Michigan-based Summit Sports Inc., which owns 16 e-commerce sites, including Skis.com, and five brick-and-mortar stores. Skis.com, for instance, appeared closer to the top of certain ski-specific searches once Kopitz’s team removed the inline skate products from the site in order to make it less cluttered.

While many retailers won’t venture into writing their own code-and they shouldn’t unless they truly know how-most legit developers will be able to walk a business through the optimization steps. If a developer claims he can get a business ranked near the top of a search in just a few days or months, he’s probably lying, Dannwolf says.

For those who feel developing an e-commerce site internally is just not possible; hiring a group of people to develop a site in a struggling economy for an industry that suffers heavily during economic lows like this is something that most retails just simply cannot do. For situations like this companies such as Google and Yahoo offer platform development services that can help retailers get starter for a much lower price.


The Yahoo program, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, is easy to setup and maintain. Yahoo offers numerous development templates, with a price range of $40 to $300 a month as well as a small transaction fee (.75% - 1.5%) on sales. The retailer also has access to Yahoo technical support, setup assistance, and other services. 


Yahoo's, Google's or any other company's platform will mold the e-commerce environment for the seller and buyer. The programs determine how products are sorted/displayed, how orders are processed, how the shopping cart systems works, among other things.