To explain the concept, let me take the example of a hardware store.Assume you own a hardware store that sells nuts,bolts,cement,floor tiles and other construction materials in your locality.
What are the basic elements that make up your hardware store ?
- A small space in a prime locality in the area where in you can setup your shop and showcase all the products that you sell.
- A Store keeper who can sit at the shop and answer the customers.
- A cashier who can check the products ordered by the customer, generate bills and collect cash from the customer.
- An accountant who can generate the reports like balance sheet,etc.
- A market where in , you can reach all your target customers.
- A small webspace is all you need to open an online hardware store. In this web space , you can put detailed catalogues of all the products that your store has including the product photos.Web space costs much much less than a normal office space.
- To replicate a store keeper one can have a chat back widget, where in a person from your store can login and wait for customer queries.The customer visting the site can talk to the store keeper in real time and resolve all the queries
- To replicate a cashier , we have the online shopping carts which customers can use to buy all the products from your online store and get the bills.Once the bills are ready, the customer has many options for paying like credit cards,debit cards,online money ransfer,etc.All these things will be taken care by payment gateways .
- For producing reports , one can use the reports generated by these payment gateways.If one is not satisfied with the reports produced by these payment gateways, one can further use other tools to get summarised info from these reports.
So, the final conclusion is that it is possible to replicate major aspects of your small business.
