Integrating brick and mortar locations with e-commerce: understanding synergy opportunities

Little empirical work has directly addressed the sources of competitive advantage of the click and mortar e-commerce approach, despite growing recognition of its importance as a business model. In this paper, we introduce a framework to describe the areas of physical and virtual synergy in click and mortar enterprises, the management actions for achieving synergies and avoiding channel conflicts, and the types of benefits that may be obtained. Case studies of ten US companies, including both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) cases are used to illustrate the utility of the framework.