Meeting with many local retailers has made one thing very clear – the sagging economy is hurting almost every industry.   Retailers are no longer evaluating how successful a day is based on total sales, but rather how many people walked through the door.  With a major decline in store traffic, retailers are looking to the web to increase sales opporunities.

As hard as it is to invest precious capital to start new projects, most retailers I talk to agree that investing in another sales channel like the internet provides a better return on investment than spending more on local advertising.  The theory is, local competition remains a constant while demand has dramatically decreased.  Expanding the target market provides more opportunity than simply fighting for a bigger portion of a declining local market.

Retailers are often under the assumption it is expensive to create an e-commerce website to sell online.  This does not have to be the case. Actually, a full functioning professional e-commerce site can be developed in short periods of time and for less than a single run in a local paper, magazine or specialty publication.