As a Manufacturer, you possess the expertise to produce quality products - Products that customer are in love with and flock in great numbers at retail outlets to buy it. However Retail distribution and Marketing in the physical world is a different ball game than Manufacturing. Therefore your Products are probably distributed and marketed as an outsourced process by other stakeholders. As a result, you as a Manufacturer have never really been involved with selling to customers directly.

With the advent of the Internet, over the last decade, there has been considerable evolution in Retail Shopping which manifests in the way in which Customers like to shop today. Sure, the story is not the same for every retail category. There is a great deal of dynamics and variation in the process from retail category to category.

Categories which don’t really have a touch and feel requirement in the buying decision making process have been the first categories to evolve in popularity on the Internet. For E.g. Books, Music, Movies, Air Tickets have been hot favorites that always ruled the roost.

There are other categories where touch and feel is critically important to the customer. For example, Garments, Jewelry, Watches, Electronics, Mobile Phones etc. But over the years there have been an evolution in the customer mindsets and these categories have now seen a good deal of E-Commerce interest too.

Further to these, there are categories where yet another crucial aspect called the “Fit factor” factor came into the picture. Customers, who were buying products that they had to wear, were not sure how they would look on them, by just looking at a picture of it on the Internet. Examples are Categories like Garments, Shoes, and certain types of Jewelry. Although customers were a little reluctant to adapt to such categories in the past, with the introduction of Cash on Delivery and Free returns policy, such barriers of the past are being lowered too.

As customers get more and more ready to buy on the Internet, Marketers are gearing up to capitalize on this opportunity. The bottom line in a majority of the cases has come down to the Price Competitiveness being offered Online. Marketers have been trying to bargain better wholesale price deals directly with Manufacturers or Brand Owners to pass on the Best Price Advantage to Customers. Without any doubt the only crucial success quotient in Online Business is the quantum of Online Sales transactions.

As has been the trend in evolved markets, it is a viable possibility for Manufacturers both big and small to look at the opportunity of selling directly to their Customers. This works particularly well in certain categories which does not need a conventional Distribution system of Retail Outlets to sell to Customers.