Overcoming the hurdles of being a small, local producer
For most folks, it’s far more preferable to buy from a mom-and-pop shop as opposed to a big-box corporation. It offers up a sense of community and a feeling that you’re purchasing a real quality product, not some mass-produced item made overseas.
Mom-and-pop shops, as we all know, however, don’t have it easy. Oftentimes, their quality goods cost a little bit more than the mass-produced stuff flooding the market. Consumers then flock to Target or Wal-Mart instead for their low, low prices. And as for the digital tools that the bigger chains use for marketing to get those customers inside their stores? Well, sometimes the smaller outfits don’t have the ample resources to take advantage of them. Or at least, they don’t think they do.
For small businesses that don’t have big fancy marketing departments full of tech wizzes and enterprise software, more and more tools are popping up to help them compete in the digital age.
In fact, in a recent Mashable article titled, “5 hot ecommerce trends to watch,” Chris Andrasick, CEO of Tacit Knowledge, says that mom-and-pop shops have an advantage that extends beyond customer loyalty – and it’s one that falls in the category of logistics. “Smaller stores aren’t saddled with anachronistic organizational structures that segment a business by channel, such as store, catalog or digital,” he says. Mashable refers to it as the mom-and-pop effect.
In the article, Mashable – with the help of Andrasick – takes a look at SumAll, one of many companies that are surfacing to cater to the “moms and pops of the web.” The startup aims to give small- to medium-sized businesses a leg up when it comes to analyzing their equally small- to medium-sized websites. SumAll provides big data but in a scaled-down manner, making it easier for moms and pops to work with the “real-time metrics that are having the biggest impact on their bottom line,” Mashable explains.
The real takeaway from the Mashable article, however, is that consumers want to give their hard-earned dollars to small businesses; they just need to be able to find them in the ever-growing mix of retailers. And by that same token, small businesses also want to deliver on the things that consumers need; all they have to do is take advantage of the tech tools that were created specifically with them in mind.
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