Why open a physical store? There were several reasons which all contributed to the decision to add a storefront to our business. First was the ability to offer our local customers a lower price on many of our items. I know it seems strange that a physical store would actually offer a lower price than an amazon.com business, but because of various fees and the market nature of amazon.com prices often shift up and down a lot. Not only does this cost the customer more, but our margins also become squeezed.
Secondly, having a physical store allows us to offer a much more diverse range of products. Playmobil for example requires that you have a brick and mortar location in order to be a vendor. Now that we have our store, our product lines have been expanding greatly. We have, in just the last month, added Chuggington, Hogwild Toys, and KidKraft to our inventory to sell both in store and online.
Thirdly it was a bit of serendipity. The lease on the warehouse space that we had been using to store our inventory for the online business had come up, and we found our new space with a store front already in place for not much more than we paid before. since we would have plenty of room for both the storage and a store front we decided why not set up a store and see how we do?
Lastly, and most importantly, we opened the store because we love toys. Our online store is great, and it allows us to run a competitive business in today's market place, but there is nothing like having a real world toy store of your very own. We love coming in everyday to our already overflowing shelves and being able to help customers one on one to pick out exactly what they want.
We hope to see you in person some day!
-Allen
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