Click and Mortar Strategies Click-And-Mortar

Click and Mortar Strategies Click-and-Mortar Strategies -- Walmart and Old Navy During the holiday season, click-and-mortar establishments are at a distinct advantage over traditional brick establishments if they have employed strong synergistic strategies between their online presences and their physical stores. Two businesses that have developed very successful click-and-mortar operations are Walmart and Old Navy. Both use well-founded strategies to drive sales through an integrated online and storefront identity.

Walmart.com is a blend of rewards for those who complete their transactions online, and convenience for those who use the site as a gateway for shopping at the physical stores. The most prominent feature of the home page of their website at the moment is a large banner advertising sales for purchases made online. Clicking through, one finds not only the sale price for the online purchase of an item, but also an immediate view of the shipping terms of the item, and its availability in Walmart's stores.

Many items on Walmart.com are available only online, but Walmart has implemented a masterful synergistic strategy by making site-to-store shipping free on almost all of these items. This is especially effective for online sales, since one can benefit from both an online sale price and the convenience of picking it up at a nearby store for free. Of course, Walmart benefits from both the online purchase and any residual store purchases at the time of pickup.

The Walmart website makes finding your nearby store easy with its store locator option. After entering your zipcode, you are provided with a map of the nearest locations, as well as a listing of the locations with their relative distances and the opportunity to click through to specific information about those locations, including directions and local sales. While Walmart.com does an excellent job of driving web customers to their stores, they clearly are not focused on driving store customers to the web.

In a nearby store, there were no banners or literature advertising the online sale, nor were there kiosks available to use at the store. When asked, an employee was able to talk about the site-to-store shipping process, but did not know much about the online sale or other online features. While the shopping experiences at Walmart.com and at a Walmart store are similar in many ways, the shopping experience at Oldnavy.com and an Old Navy store are quite different.

Oldnavy.com was not offering any exclusively online sales at the moment, but many of their offerings on the website are available only online. They do not seem concerned with driving sales to their physical storefronts. Their store locator requires several click-throughs, and while it does provide a map of nearby stores, it does not provide a list of their comparative distances or their local sales.

In addition, Oldnavy.com does not provide the convenience of free site-to-store shipping, nor does it tell you, like the Walmart site does, whether an item you are looking at online is available at your local store as well. Its website does have more of a presence in the stores, however. I found two print advertisements for the website in my local Old Navy store, and a sales associate was enthusiastic.