Bricks and clicks

Bricks and clicks (aka clicks and bricks, click and mortar, bricks, clicks and flips, Womble Store Method (WSM) or WAMBAM) is a jargon term for a business model by which a company integrates both offline (bricks) and online (clicks) presences, sometimes with the third extra flips (physical catalogs). Additionally, many will also offer telephone ordering and mobile phone apps, or at least provide telephone sales support. The advent of mobile web has made businesses operating bricks and clicks businesses especially popular, because it means customers can do tasks like shopping when they have spare time and do not have to be at a computer. Many of these users prefer to use mobile shopping sites.

A popular example of the bricks and clicks model is when a chain of stores allows the customer to order products either online or physically in one of their stores, also allowing them to either pick-up their order directly at a local branch of the store or get it delivered to their home. There are many alternative combinations of this model. The success of the model in many sectors has lessened the credibility of some analysts who argued that the Internet would render traditional retailers obsolete through disintermediation.

The first ever purchase from a company arguably operating a bricks and clicks business model was a Pizza Hut pizza, ordered over the internet from a physical store. The online pizza delivery industry is something of a pioneer of the model and has gained a great deal of popularity since, with delivery company Dominos Pizza now reporting that over 69.7% of orders are placed online before being sent to a physical store, gaining the firm £204.7m (approx. $329m) in 2013 in the United Kingdom alone. The great surge in adoption of the bricks and clicks model came around 2000, with large retailers such as Wal Mart starting websites that allow users to browse the same goods they would find in store from the comfort of their homes.

The bricks and clicks model has typically been used by traditional retailers who have extensive logistics and supply chains, but are well known and often respected for their traditional physical presence. Part of the reason for its success is that it is far easier for a traditional retailer to establish an online presence than it is for a start-up company to employ a successful purely online one, or for an online only retailer to establish a traditional presence, including a strong and well recognised brand, without having a large marketing budget. It can also be said that adoption of a bricks and clicks model where a customer can return items to a brick and mortar store can reduce wasted costs to a business such as shipping for undelivered and returned items that would traditionally be incurred.

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Wikipedia