Overview

Many small retailers open up stores because they are passionate about their merchandise. The entrepreneurs that start these stores might be gifted buyers, finding just the right products for their stores, or they might have a unique gift for interacting with customers and helping them select the perfect item from the store.

Translating these skills into the online world can be difficult. These days it seems like everybody in retailing has to have an online presence. With stories in the press of huge eRetailing failures losing sums of money that many small retailers can only dream of, it is hardly surprising small retailers are concerned about their online strategy.

The challenge for many small retailers is developing an online store that reflects the very uniqueness of their offline stores without breaking the bank and draining from cash flow. 

There are many low cost options retailers can use to get their feet wet online. Services such as Excite Freetailer allow small online stores to be built within a template design for very little effort and almost no cost. However, these template based services are designed to build thousands of stores quickly and cheaply, sacrificing individuality and flexibility in the process. This would be like building your brick and mortar retail store from a pre-set range of store designs with limited fixturing options. It may be a cheap way to build a store, but it fails to recognize what retail is all about!

The alternative is to build a custom designed store from scratch. This can be done in-house if you have the expertise, but very few companies have such expertise with spare time on their hands. Outsourcing the website development is the other option, but this can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a professionally developed site up and running. And once you have your site, you then need to pay very expensive programmers to maintain it for you. Just like your physical store, the online store must be merchandised regularly to attract new customers and repeat visitors.

What many small retailers really need is a way to develop a custom designed online store that is easy to maintain, does not break the bank, is inexpensive to run, and provides the creative flexibility to build an online store that mirrors the unique characteristics of the offline store.

To meet this need, The International eRetail Association and eRetailNews and BizBrick Corporation have developed eRetail+ (eRetail Plus). This is an online store development service that small retailers can use to professionally create their own unique online presence without losing creative control.

The eRetail+ store can be easily maintained by anyone with basic PC skills and it has all the power and flexibility to be developed into a highly sophisticated e-commerce web site.

eRetail+ has been designed to utilize off-the-shelf tools to design and develop custom eRetail web sites for small retailers. We believe in the need to give entrepreneurs the freedom to create and manage their own online destiny; we provide the framework on which to build a unique online identity.

To learn more about eRetail+, follow the arrows......

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