Tuesday, June 19, 2001

Clicks and Bricks Thrives

Despite the gloom-and-doom of many pure dot-com's, the three-in-four websites that are part of the "Click-and-Brick crowd see Internet revenues playing an increasingly dominant role in their companies in 2001 through 2003. For the 76% of online companies that also sell offline, the so-called "click-and-brick" businesses, one-third of revenues came from connections made on the Internet last year, and nearly half of all revenues for these companies will arrive from online contacts in 2002 according to ActivMedia Research's latest report, "E-Survivors: Winning e-Commerce Strategies for 2001."

"Click-and-brick" companies may not seem sexy compared with the high-flying ``dot-com's", but each year they accrue increasing revenue from their online efforts. And, thanks to their mainstream product lines and well-established business capabilities, they are surviving where the "dot-bombs" are failing. According to the more than 500 online business executives that took part in this new research, growth rates for Internet contributions to "click-and-brick" business will soar over the next two years as their "Net-Centricity Quotients" continue to rise to become a majority of all company revenues by 2003.

According to Harry Wolhandler, VP at ActivMedia Research, "The success of online business may actually be contributing to the sense of economic decline in 2001in many companies in the US and abroad. Such robust business gains among the online/offline vendors have to come from elsewhere in the economy. More specifically, companies that are not participating in the online growth spurt are losing share to those that are already online. Like it or not, the Internet is a fact of life for competitive business in the future. Mainstream businesses that create an effective synthesis of on-and-offline strategies are going to reap the benefits. Now that the dot-com's have turned into dot-bombs, the picture of what it takes to survive online is becoming much clearer."