Yes, now more than ever. More and more people look for businesses through the internet. Having a professional website is the easiest and least expensive way to inform and market to the public. No where else can you inform your customers of your hours, contact information, information about your business, and even your inventory of toys.
Here are a few articles that discuss the importance for a successful business to have a quality website.
From TDMonthly, the toy industry trade magazine.
Online Toy Shopping – Warns that websites take time to manage.
Retail Solutions – Says e-mail newsletters are the lowest-cost, highest-response form of marketing.
Business Blogs – Talks about the benefits of successful blogging. (italics ours)
From EdPlay, the magazine for specialty toy stores:
What You Should Do With Your Website NOW – An expert lays out the case for every retailer to have an e-commerce site.
Tips to Make Your Website More Competitive For Little to No Money – All good advice: Write findable content, leverage your newsletters, track your traffic with Google Analytics, and network like crazy on Facebook, etc. Our system lets you do all those things fairly easily.
A cached article from retail-merchandiser.com.
This was linked from the Bloom Report, but disappeared the next day. We tracked down Google’s cached copy of it: “The Online Bottom Line”
The government finds more small business selling more things online:
Small Retailers Finding Greater Percentages of Revenue Coming from eCommerce Sale
and lastly… tips on free ways to increase traffic:
How to Boost Web Site Traffic Using Only Proven Free Techniques – The good stuff is in the middle.