Brick and Click Store

With the rise of ecommerce, traditional brick-and-mortar stores are starting to become obsolete. In their place rise “brick and click” establishments which give customers an integrated online and offline experience when buying goods and/or services.

Example of how the term is used in a sentence: “With the introduction of its online grocery store, supermarket powerhouse Safeway is clearly trying to turn itself into a “brick-and-click” establishment.”

As the name suggests, a “brick-and-click” company is one that has both a “traditional” offline store (the “bricks”) and an online one (the “clicks”).

The Advantages & Disadvantages of Brick and Click Stores

Though this business model might sound easy at first glance (since anyone can build an online ecommerce store nowadays), the integration of a successful brick and click system can actually be quite stressful. First, both online and offline portals would need to be perfectly in sync. Business owners run the risk of overselling or underselling if inventories are not kept in sync.

The usual solution for this problem is the use of a single, real-time automated, POS (point-of-sale) system for both offline and online portals. This keeps inventories in sync and also simplifies accounting processes.