If you travel to antique and thrift stores in America’s heartland you find a slightly different idea of marketing than Broadway in New York. .
“Do know anybody about your size that might need a leather jacket?”
“You wouldn’t have any idea what a fella could do with a Queen Anne’s chair?”
These comments are a not so clever way of asking you to take a look at something the proprietor of a store may feel you have overlooked.
In most cases these second hand stores rely on word of mouth advertising and they have been known to negotiate a better price unlike their discount store counterparts.
There was a time in our collective history when barter was a primary tool in making a purchase. In many cases it was the very skills you possessed that could be used as leverage in acquiring something you and your family needed. Doctors would claim they were forced to take poultry and livestock in exchange for services and General Store owners often traded flour for eggs.
Ecommerce would be foreign territory for famed writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. She lived in a more primitive time in more harsh environs and if she wanted to connect with someone in New York she waited weeks for a postage reply.
If there is something that can be learned from this era it is that sometimes you have to think creatively to make something work. There was a time when produce and personal skills could be traded for needed staples. Today the equivalent creativity comes both in online marketing and networking.
Ecommerce thrives because relationships are formed and forged in the realm of networking. The result is increased traffic. The obstacles that keep an online business from success are within a lack of creative thinking.
The old adage is true; there are no problems, only solutions. The adventurous entrepreneur finds the solutions and forgets the excuses.
While it’s true that most of the world’s population would not be interested in going back to the days of Ms. Wilder, the pioneering spirit she expressed resides in the maverick spirit of ecommerce and it is there that is thrives.
Is it so hard to think back to the 1980’s when the Internet was not widespread? If you had been approached as a business owner about possibly putting a website together and then seeking to sell products to a global client base you likely would have refused on the grounds that the request was an absurd notion, but there were some businesses that did broach the subject of ecommerce and discovered a novel approach to sales.
Early adopters of this technology have reaped enormous benefits. Many of these businesses express dynamic sales online that far surpass anything they have experienced in their brick and mortar stores. It took time – it took patience – and it took ecommerce to make it happen.
Someday these will be the ‘good old days’ and someone will look to the maverick spirit of the early adopters of ecommerce and find encouragement from these new millennium pioneers.
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