The imaging supplies industry is a mature business; according to various industry analysts, annual retail dollars are now declining along with printed page volumes. However, despite the decline in total spending, the market remains vast, with over $25B in retail dollars expected to be spent in the United States on ink and toner alone.
Web traffic - the holy grail of modern business and essential for office products resellers and e-commerce strategies. However, developing sustainable, relevant traffic is hard work, likely to take a long time, and involves both science and art. Figure it out, build enterprise value, sit back, do nothing, and watch the competition eat your lunch!
In 2009 or so, I asked our marketing manager what we should be doing regarding our business strategy and social media. I was both concerned and intrigued with what was going on with social media marketing in small businesses. Still, I didn't know what our strategy should be or what value could be extracted from such an initiative.
E-commerce or "out"! Monday, August 31, 2015 In a small business environment, e-commerce is often thought of as no more than an online catalog and shopping cart with little to no effort to transition an existing business base onto an e-commerce platform.
Much has changed with the way commerce is conducted worldwide over the last 20 - 30 years, but it seems not much of that change has been embraced by the small to medium size independent office products and office supplies dealerships.
It used to be that an integrated information technology platform was restricted to big enterprises with budgets available to support multi-million dollar implementations of mainframe-based enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle, etc.
After two start-ups and ten years of building fully integrated information technology platforms on which to operate them, I have concluded the following two key points:
