[Pages S9696-S9697]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IN PRAISE OF FRED WILBER, BUCH SPIELER AND CYBERSELLING IN VERMONT
<bullet> Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I want to congratulate Fred Wilber
from my hometown of Montpelier, Vermont on his cyberselling success.
For the last twenty-seven years, Fred Wilber has owned Buch Spieler,
a music store in downtown Montpelier. Recently the New York Times
reported on Buch Spieler's growing sales from its Internet site at
http://www.bsmusic.com. Mr. President, I ask that the full text of the
New York Times article of September 22, 2000, titled ``The Opposite of
Amazon.com,'' be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.
The success of Fred Wilber is a shining example for all Vermont small
business owners to follow. By taking advantage of the new markets
offered by the Internet for its goods and services, Buch Spieler has
increased overall sales by 10 percent and expanded its customer base by
20 percent in the last year and a half. For years we Vermonters have
complained about not having access to a major market to sell our goods.
Now through the Internet, we can sell our goods in the blink of an eye
to anyone in the world as Fred Wilber and Buch Spieler have shown.
I commend Fred Wilber for being a cyberselling leader and tapping
into the Internet's world markets.
The article follows:
[From the New York Times; Sept. 22, 2000]
The Opposite of Amazon.com
(By Leslie Kaufman)
For 27 years, Fred Wilber has run a quirky music store
called Buch Spieler in downtown Montpelier, Vt., population
of roughly 8,000. The store, which sells out-of-print movie
soundtracks, among other goodies, has had its ups and downs,
but in 1998, as Internet music distributors like CDNow and
MP3.com exploded in popularity, Mr. Wilber began to worry
that the Web would be his Waterloo.
His answer was to build his own Web site (www.bsmusic.com).
Designed by his brother and lacking time-saving features like
one-click shopping, it is hardly slick. But it has been
successful.
In the year and a half since the site went into service,
Mr. Wilber says overall sales have jumped 10 percent. Just as
important, he estimates, the Internet has expanded his
customer base by some 20 percent. It turns out that Mr.
Wilber's peculiar tastes have been strengths on the Web. When
the site was recently sent an e-mail message requesting the
score from ``Gordy! The Little Pig That Hit It Big!'' a 1995
movie, he simply took it off the shelf and shipped it.
``It is not easy e-commerce,'' Mr. Wilber said of his Web
site. ``But we are not trying to compete with Amazon. We
focus on our own niche.''
To many experts, the advent of the Internet seemed to
signal a grim future for mom-and-pop retailers. Increased
competition and the availability of a diverse array of
merchandise to populations that had been essentially captive
audiences threatened to erode their customer base.
But a survey of more than 1,500 businesses in 16 downtown
commercial districts nationwide, released earlier this month
by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, indicates
that the Internet can spur sales in storefront retail
businesses. Just as they compete in the brick-and-mortar
world against big-box enemies like Wal-Mart Stores and Home
Depot, small retailers seem to do best in the virtual world
by focusing on unusual products or aiming to give excellent,
personalized customer service.
The National Trust is a nonprofit organization that
develops programs to support and maintain historic downtown
areas. And because the survey canvassed only merchants in
towns where some revitalization of historic downtown areas in
under way, the National Trust said its results probably
overstate the positive impact of the Web on all small
businesses. Even so, the news was surprisingly upbeat.
The trust's survey, one of the first in the nation to
examine the impact of e-commerce on small retailers, found
that some 16.4 percent of Main Street businesses it polled
were already using the Internet to sell things. Further, the
survey found, merchants that sell online--with most of them
starting their Web sites only within the last 18 months--have
experienced a 12.8 percent increase in overall sales. On
average, 14.3 percent of their total sales are now
attributable to the Internet.
Small, specialized businesses ``are really starting to
gravitate toward the Web,'' said Kennedy Smith, director of
the National Trust's Main Street Center. ``The thing that was
a surprise was the extent to which it was helping them.'' For
a struggling storefront operation, a 5 percent increase in
sales can make the difference between shutting its doors or
staying open, Ms. Smith said.
The news about small storefront retailers presents a stark
contrast to larger, purely e-commerce retailers. Many experts
once suggested that even individual entrepreneurs working out
of homes and garages--selling everything from books to bow
ties--would prosper on the Internet as barriers to entry were
eliminated. But as it has turned out, while several of these
pure e-retailers had jumps in sales initially, they are now
struggling to make money as the challenges of
[[Page S9697]]
marrying cyberspace and the real world have become clear.
Hundreds of these operations are now cutting back or going
out of business entirely.
Established name-brand retailers, so-called clicks-and-
mortars, have also had their share of tribulations on the
Internet. While many have recorded strong sales through their
online arms, it has often come at enormous cost. To sustain
the level of service associated with their stores, most big-
name retailers have had to do everything from hire new
workers to set up a separate warehouse operation to handle
the orders.
There is no way to know exactly how many small storefront
merchants do business over the Web, but their ranks are
already in the tens of thousands and growing. As of May, some
29 percent of all American small businesses--from retailers
to public relations firms--had Web sites, according to the
Kelsey Group, a consulting firm specializing in local
advertising and e-commerce. That is up from 23 percent in May
of last year.
Of this Web-connected minority, almost half are selling
goods over the Interent, according to the Kelsey Group, which
gets its information from a survey of a national panel of 600
businesses with fewer than 100 employees.
The use of the Web by small retailers is likely to
accelerate because many larger companies, hoping that small
businesses could be revenue generators, have been
intensifying efforts to bring mom-and-pop stores online over
the course of the last year.
Last September, for example, Amazon.com started zShops, a
service that allows small businesses to have a link to their
products pop up when a visitor to Amazon clicks on a relevant
book or compact disc. A seller of spice grinders, say, could
arrange for a link to appear every time a person clicked on a
book about Indian cooking.
Web developers of all sizes--from Microsoft to tiny outfits
run by a couple of a guys in a college dorm--are offering
small businesses access to a range of Web services, from Web
site design to purchasing banner advertising. In fact, the
business of providing Web services to small operators has
already become competitive enough that many of the mom-and-
pop retailers said their entry costs had been very
reasonable.
James and Mary DeFore, for example, own a women and
children's store called Unique Boutique in downtown
Thomasville, Ga., a small city of about 20,000 people. They
were doing a healthy side business in prom dresses, and
decided that if they offered them on the Web they might
attract rural customers who could not get into town. So last
January, they hired a local service provider, who for a few
hundred dollars designed a simple but colorful Web site with
the catchy name Time for Prom (timeforprom.com).
The site went live in February, and by march the DeFores
were getting up to 40,000 visitors to their Web site each
month. By June, they had nearly 500 orders for dresses that
cost $150 to $200. And requests came not just from rural
areas in Georgia but also from Missouri and West Virginia and
even Hawaii and Japan. ``The biggest problem,'' Mr. DeFore
said, ``was fulfilling all the orders.''
Despite not having a powerful brand name or being linked to
a powerful portal like Yahoo or America Online, Time for Prom
shows that small retailers need not get lost in the vast
clutter on the Internet if they develop a clear, arrow
identity.
In fact, another Thomasville retailer, Hi-Fi Sales and
Service, which specializes in equipment for home theaters and
live field recording, did $1.9 million in business over the
Web last year, which represented a significant portion of its
total sales, and now gets some 30 percent of its new
customers online with no advertising.
The key to the success of Hi-Fi Sales is making sure it is
visible. ``We spend a lot of energy making sure we come up
high in the search engines,'' said Jim Oade, one of the three
brothers who co-own the business. Each search engine has
different rules for deciding in what order to list businesses
related to key words, he said. So one of the brothers, Doug
Oade, devotes himself, among other things, to keeping current
with the rules and making sure the company's Web site
(www.oade.com) has enough of the right key words to pop up
swiftly when a consumer wants audio products.
The Oade brothers' national customer base is still fairly
unusual among mom-and-pop ventures. Most storefront retailers
use the Internet mainly for defending and cementing the
relationship with customers they already have--a relationship
that is very much under siege by giant retailers.
Osborn Drugs in Miami (pronounced Mi-AM-a), Okal., has been
a family drugstore for 29 years. Since it started its Web
site in 1996, sales through the Interent have increased only
about 5 percent a year, according to Bill Osborn, who runs
the store with his father. But more than 90 percent of the
traffic on the Web site comes from regular long-term Osborn
customers who just like to e-mail their prescriptions in.
``We view it as a way to service customers we already have,''
Bill Osborn said. ``We are not trying to go public as
osborndrug.com.''<bullet>
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