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THE FUTURE IS NOW: ONLINE SALES ARE SUPPLANTING BRICK AND MORTAR SALES

By Maurice Bretzfield

It was not long ago, that many merchants felt the Internet was a passing fancy, and then they believed it could only be an adjunct to their normal operations. Now, within the last few years, Internet sales are surging, dwarfing the sales of many traditional merchants. Indeed, there are Web companies that only sell on the Internet and are doing a spectacular amount of business. Not just the well-known names such as Amazon.com and Overstock, but also smaller companies such as Home Shopping Network's Improvement Catalog, Cooking.com, and AppetizersToGo.com, none of which have walk-in stores. LL Bean has said that it expects its online sales to exceed those of its hard copy catalogue in just two years! Right now, many catalogue companies still do not realize the substantial amount of sales they can earn on the Web.

Even service companies such as accountants and lawyers are developing an important Web presence that draws in a considerable amount of business.

One reason for the success of Internet businesses is that it targets individual customers; it doesn't resort to typical mass market selling.

The key to online marketing is one-to-one selling. Amazon.com, for example, knows each of its regular customer's preferences, and so it can offer books to suit each individual's interests. Amazon has each customer's e-mail address and can offer each customer newly published books that will appeal to the reader's interests.

In effect, customers give particular merchants the right to sell directly to them. Not only has Amazon.com done that, but also so have the other Web businesses that I noted earlier: Improvements Catalog, Cooking.com and AppetizersToGo.com. Permission marketing is what gets and keeps customers coming back to their favorite Web sites.

Of course, merchants must provide excellent service and products, or bloggers will trash their names throughout the World Wide Web and no one will want to deal with those merchants.

To be successful on the Web, one must understand the intricacies and vagaries of Web marketing.

One must begin by creating a Web-marketing plan; it's something that the old brick and mortar companies are not doing. Such merchants are happy to grow by 15% per annum; Web merchants, however, can experience exponential explosions of growth from year to year.

Toys R Us tried selling directly on the Web in the late 1990s, but if failed, for it did not have a marketing program that took in all the variables necessary for a successful operation. Toys R Us did not have its own platform; without a platform of its own a business is doomed to failure. Any Web merchant that does not have a coherent Web platform will not succeed.

Another company, Sony, believed that it could not sell its merchandise on the Web without alienating its wholesalers and diverting sales; however, it achieved dramatically increased sales and revenue by creating new venues for sales, without diverting sales from its wholesalers and retailers.

Cooking.com began in 1998 as a pure Web company. They started with an excellent understanding of the Internet as a new medium and understood how customers would relate to it. They developed a robust Affiliate Network. They conclude each sale by asking each of its customers, “Can we send you information about items that will be of interest to you?” They would subsequently send e-mails to consumers almost every week and sometimes more frequently. And they were getting new customers every day from tens of thousands of Affiliates. And the vast majority of those customers became repeat customers as a result of permission, one-to-one marketing. That applies to more than 15,000 products. In addition, its special newsletters for Affiliates kept those Affiliates pumped up about new promotions and sales opportunities. It succeeded because it was not hampered by traditional selling constraints.

For Web-based companies, such as the ones I have given as examples, exhaustive research of thousands of prospective potential Web affiliates must be undertaken before an Affiliate Network program can be put in place. Once the research has been complete, Affiliates are invited to participate in an Affiliate Marketing program. Each Affiliate is given promotional tools, such as uniquely branded banners for their sites. Each prospective Affiliate has to fill out an in-depth application: there can be no sites that contain or advocate hate and/or pornography; in other words, there can be no sites that would offend a prospective customer, or that would tarnish a company's brand. Each affiliate site must be evaluated periodically, checking its content. In addition, there must be constant evaluation of sales volume, prices, and product sell-through, all of which help to lead to dramatic sales increases. If a site changes its content and is no longer appropriately oriented, it must be eliminated as an Affiliate.

Affiliate Networks are not passive entities. For one's Affiliate Network to put cash in one's coffers, it must be pro-active. No Web site achieves success by waiting for customers to come knocking. Customers must be identified by their shopping preferences, solicited, and lured by appeals to their self-interest so that they arrive (credit card in hand) at one's Web site. And that's precisely what effective and pro-active Internet Affiliate Marketing does.

In addition to garnering a dramatic increase in one's sales and revenues through Internet Affiliate Marketing, there is a further financial incentive: there are no up-front advertising costs. Depending on size and ad budgets, companies spend thousands or millions of dollars on conventional advertising. With Internet Affiliate Marketing, however, one pays a commission only when a sale is consummated. There's no waving good-bye to ad dollars that escape and never bring a return on one's investment.

Whoever drives the largest number of actual customers to one's website will receive the largest financial rewards. The affiliates are commission-based sales people with a hungry incentive to produce customers. Web merchants pay only for completed sales. And those sales, through a successful Affiliate Network Marketing program can grow at 50% a year, year after year.

Maurice Bretzfield , is the President and CEO of EComWorks , the leader in Affiliate Network Marketing, and is highly regarded as one of the Internet's foremost online marketing experts who, since 1997, has built and managed Affiliate Networks for many prestigious clients. For further information, you may contact him at