[Myrmornis]

Surely the obvious question is: is the high street shop really a justified expense? Surely all the sales are online? The more specialized the shop, the less one can hope to fulfill ones sales volume from people in physical cruising distance. The article doesn’t seem to address this, except for acknowledging that most sales are online.

[Iv]

In theory it does not make a lot sense. In practice, I am amazed at how much crap most online webshops are.

In a shop I can browse through the wares much easier. I can examine them, look at the size and specs, feel the weight and texture, get ideas.

More often than not, crucial specs of the product I am looking at are not available. Dimensions and weights are often missing, I often can't look at more than 5 or 6 articles at the time.

Webshops are great when you know exactly what you need. They are hell if your need is "4 or 5 buttons that would look good on that fabric"

[pbhjpbhj]

Just trying to find things like washers online had been a nightmare for me before -- how can they list the external diameter and not internal, how can they not say what material it is, or the thickness!??

I ended up trawling a few local plumbing supply stores and was really surprised how few washers they had, about the fourth store had a few random open boxes they let me rummage through and we agreed a price. It was unexpectedly difficult.

I've found similar problems getting screws I want (for a ceramics kiln). Gave up and used the best thing I could find in Screwfix (which aren't that good).

[mattkrause]

A lot of these shops also have excellent customer service.

The guy with a million kinds of tape can help you find a product that does X and Y, but won’t Z and matches your color scheme, the ukulele shop owner might recommend one that fits you or your style.

You could probably call around and get similar advice, but the places offering this kind of advice aren’t going to have free overnight shipping either.

[ljcn]

The answer is probably that shop owners would rather work in a shop that satisfies online orders than in a warehouse.

[saalweachter]

The physical shopping radius for a specialty shop is also a lot larger than a generic store.

If you have the store to find mid-century burnished widgets at, people might regularly come from a hundred or more miles away when they really need just the right sort of widget, and when they do -- if your stock lives up to the hype -- they will tend to be big customers, buying a lot (since they weren't casually dropping in), being fairly price insensitive (since they have few alternatives for what they need), and repeat customers (since you seldom end up needing a specialty item once).

You might still need an online storefront, or you might take phone orders from your regulars, but the clientele of a specialty shop is radically different than the clientele of a generic shop, which relies more on people wandering by and which competes with ten other stores a mile away, and the big box store off the highway.

[pjc50]

I think this is exactly it - these stores are now perfect fusion of small online store and small offline store. If you order something online the owner picks it off the shelf and puts it in an envelope - and the online shop can drive traffic to the physical one.

[majewsky]

On the contrary, I think many of these particular shops shown in the article can only work as brick-and-mortar. Think about the button guy. He's probably a one-man show. How is he going to enter 10,000s of SKUs in a webshop, and maintain accurate stock numbers?

[rospaya]

If you're in an area where the postman (or any delivery service) sucks, online shopping becomes a hassle.