“Helping Customers who already have Customers”

• Conglomerate Retailing Giants
• Large Brands / Private Label Solutions
• Telecommunications / Cable Companies
• Interactive / Media Titans
• ISPs / ASPs/ Web Hosting Companies
• Hardware Bundlers

Brick & Mortar
Far from the cloud of doom for Internet pure play companies; the Internet has in fact become a channel of distribution for many brick-and-mortar businesses. From Time Warner to Wal-Mart.com, brick-and-mortar operations have realized that their current customers, as well as their potential customers, are surfing, entertaining, working and shopping on-line. Two factors—the convenience of buying on-line and increasingly secure technologies safeguarding Internet transactions—are pressuring brick-and-mortar businesses to establish virtual stores that will maintain and expand relationships with their customers in the new online economy.

Brick and Mortar versus Internet Pure Play
Brick-and-mortar businesses have the advantage of an established brand name, customer base, and an inventory system. While Internet pure plays must devote resources and time to building a brand name and customer base from ground zero, brick-and-mortar businesses are immediately able to serve their existing customers on-line and, at the same time, focus on acquiring new customers.

However, as brick-and-mortar businesses take the initial steps to go on-line and become click-and-mortar, they face the challenges and risks associated with balancing their resources between traditional media and the on-line channel. As evidence of this struggle, our research showed that click-and-mortar businesses tend to invest less than Internet pure plays in their on-line storefronts.

Supply Chain versus Demand Chain

Global Portals turnkey solutions turn the business supply chain upside down. In the old days, as its name suggest, the supply chain was driven by supply. After corporate research departments attempted to gauge how many units of a given product the market could absorb, the supply chain went into action, producing all those units. Executives could do little more than cross their fingers and hope they didn’t end up with too many surplus units.

Global Portals turns the supply chain into a true demand chain. The impulses sent up the chain are not the crude guesses of research departments but the demands of customers. Today, its Cisco, Dell, and Nortel – tomorrow GM, Delta, Nike, Blockbuster, Pepsi, American Express. What do they respond to? Actual customer orders.

Fulfillment is Customer Relations

Customer fulfillment requires not just filling orders but also providing customers with a deeper sense of satisfaction that the word fulfillment suggests. It is no longer enough for a company to toss customers a product. The company must build a relationship with them. Using Global Portals companies can ensure that indeed, customer relationships now represent a form of wealth in and of themselves.

Percentage of Brick-and-Mortar with Domain Names
Interestingly, despite the race to get on-line, our analysis showed that only a small percentage of brick-and-mortar businesses have registered and established an on-line identity. In particular, industries such as Retail Trade and Services, which have been among the forefront of Internet adoption, still lag far behind some of the more characteristically Old Economy industries in terms of market saturation.

In other words, opportunities are abound for brick-and-mortar businesses looking to make a name for themselves in the new online economy. Global Portals Online provides the most effective low cost solution to capture and establish the basis for a long-term relationship with those existing and newly acquiring customers.