When the Going Gets Tough, Go Online

Multi-Channel Merchants Should Turn to Online Retail to Succeed During Tough Economic Times

It is no secret that the Web is the best place to look for the lowest prices on almost every product available for sale these days. Not surprisingly, shoppers are skipping the retail outlets and going straight to the Web to make their purchases during this economic downturn.

According to a recent Nielsen study, trips to U.S. retail outlets have decreased by 1.4% in the third quarter of 2008, compared with Q3 2007. However, retail channels offering low prices did best during Q3 2008. Trips to online retailers went up by 7.5%, while trips to supercenters and dollar stores increased 3.6% and 3% respectively, showing the largest increases, compared with Q3 2007.

Brick-and-mortar-only stores could take a big hit from the economy without an online store to compensate for the lost revenue. Most small, boutique shops are hesitant to invest on eCommerce solutions fearing the price tag would be too steep to afford. Yet, shopping cart software platforms like AspDotNetStorefront offer a cost-effective online store solution with features that surpass even some of the priciest eCommerce platforms.

ImageBEAM recently partnered with AspDotNetStorefront to add feature-rich, PCI-compliant eCommerce solutions built on AspDotNetStorefront's ML and IS platforms to its clients.

Filling a Gap in Sharepoint

I'm seeing a lot of our clients add blogging to their Intranet sites as a means of enabling corporate communications. But hidden in the long grass, how do you find the buttercups?

How about an Intranet home page that shows rich summaries of the latest blogs or wikis?

The surprising thing is that MOSS does not do that (effectively) out of the box. ImageBEAM has developed a mini-product that does - MOSS Trimmer™ cuts those verbose blogs down to the number of characters you want to display on the home page to give a sense of the content. So if you have some ramblers in your company, that's fine. Let them get lost in the forest of their thoughts. You can keep the lawn neatly trimmed.

Stay tuned for the release of this new product from ImageBEAM.