Wide variety of on-line stores now available, more being added daily!
FishingWorld.com, the company that brings fishing industry news, products and services to the Internet, has announced the development of a simple-to-use e-Commerce program that helps businesses sell their products and services on their own web pages – without knowing html programming language.
“Our new eStore system provides the means for the independent retailers to put their own business on the Internet in a low cost way by providing a simple fill-in-the-blank format that allows businesses to input their own product photos and descriptions. With this system, the retailer can create their web pages from their desktop computer. The system builds their inventory database dynamically as the individual products are added” said Larry Thompson, Marketing Director.
“The program gives businesses the flexibility to customize the navigation of their eStore web pages, whether the business carries as only a few items or tens of thousands of different items. We don’t have to charge set-up charges, because the businesses actually build their own databases and handle their own inventory.”
Instead of a static entrance web page, the new eStore system presents a changeable “window display” to entice consumers with featured products each time the consumer visits the site.
“The other
way our eStore can save a business money is that the system generates the invoices and shipping orders automatically, saving the business owner the cost of paying people to be order takers,” Thompson said. “As the customer selects items they want to purchase, the automatic shopping cart system generates the order form showing the item number, the quantity, the price and the shipping costs and sales taxes when applicable which both the consumer and the store can print out.”
The program also is searchable, which gives consumers the opportunity to find the item they are looking for by either manufacturer or product category. We will soon open a new “doorway” for the consumer to locate the stores which carry the specific brand of tackle or even the types of tackle. This will give the retailer additional input, especially when the consumer doesn’t know which specific store they want to go to initially. Probably a more valuable benefit is that the consumer will be able to use the “master search” to search all stores at once, which will give them a greater selection that most “big box” stores can offer. This will bring back the power to the individual store which handles a lot of the hard to find unique items over the “marts” who can give better prices only on a limited number of inventory items.”
“We designed this program for small manufacturing companies, tackle shops and other types of retailers” Thompson said. “But the eStore system can be used by any business in any industry. “Part of the beauty of the Internet is that it is a great equalizer between small businesses and large businesses. There is no other medium that permits the smaller business to advertise their products as much for such a small cost,” Thompson said.
Another advantage is marketing. “FishingWorld.com puts eStore business owners in the middle of our existing fishing industry traffic. Not only are they going to have whatever traffic they could generate on their own, they’re going to get their share of our existing high traffic.” FishingWorld.com experienced more that 5 Million hits during January, 2000.
“There’s probably no other industry like the fishing industry which has a large number of retail stores and a large number of manufacturers which cannot afford a large sales force to promote their products and services,” Thompson said. “FishingWorld.com has taken the position that we are here to help the existing businesses do a better job of marketing and sales. Unlike many of the new “dot com” web sites who are trying to become a retailer themselves, FishingWorld.com is not going to be one more competitor in the retailer marketplace.”
Thompson added one more note to the retailers: “Tackle shops that enjoy a brisk local business must have an Internet presence because at least 20 to 30 percent of their consumers are online looking at somebody else’s products, They’re going to lose some of that local business they already have if they’re not careful because a portion of their customers will buy off the Internet for the convenience of shopping online during the time they want to shop. EStore owners should be sure to totally serve their local customers, and one way is to set up their on-line orders to allow for in-store pickup by these valued customers. It is important to think service and convenience.”
As one who has been involved with using the Internet for marketing and sales since it first was used for commercial purposes five years ago, Thompson said that “the biggest problem facing businesses today is not realizing that they must have an Internet presence as part of their business effort. The Internet has changed everything and those who do not acknowledge this will have a rude awaking. We want to make sure this doesn’t happen at their ‘going out of business sale’.”
For additional information about www.FishingWorld.com and their new eStore Systems, contact Larry D. Thompson at 903-882-8877 or e-mail [email protected]. Stores that currently are using the eStore system can be found at http://www.fishingworld.com/retailers.
By: Fishingworld staff
