My name is Alan Matteson. My grandfather Charlie opened Matteson's Hardware in 1934 in a wooden building on Depot Street in Coldbrook, up in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and the floor still creaks in the same places it did when I was six and sorting stove bolts for a nickel an hour. I've run the store since 1983.

In July of 1998 I put the store on the World Wide Web. Nobody asked me to. A salesman for a computer company had told me at a trade show that every store without a web site would be gone by the year 2000, and I went home and stayed up three nights in a row with a book from the library and FrontPage Express, which came free with Windows 98 on the store's new computer. Fourteen months later the store is still here, and so am I, and I've learned a few things the salesman didn't mention.

Since spring I've had calls from the owner of a feed store, a bakery, two gift shops and a fellow who repairs outboard motors, all asking the same thing: should I do it? I don't think there's one answer. But there are twelve questions, and I wish somebody had handed them to me before I started. So here they are. The results, with real numbers, are on their own page.

The Twelve Questions

1. What is the page for?
   Write it down in one sentence before you do anything else. Mine, once I finally wrote it, was: So people can find out whether we're open and whether we carry it, without calling. That sentence would have saved me a week of fussing over a page about the history of the building that I'm told about four people have read.

2. Who will keep it current?
   Put a name on it. If it's you, say so out loud. A store page with last Christmas's hours on it in March is worse than no page, because somebody will drive forty minutes on the strength of it. Ours gets looked at every Monday night, and the date at the bottom tells you the last time I changed anything.

3. Can you answer e-mail within a day?
   If a customer calls and nobody answers, they call back. If they e-mail and nobody answers, they decide you're careless, and they don't say so. I check the store's mail at opening and again at closing. Most answers take one line. "Yes, we have it, $4.29." "Closed Thanksgiving, open Friday at 7:30."

4. Do you really need to sell on the Web?
   Probably not, and this is where I'd stop most people from spending money. To take a credit card on a web page safely you need a secure server and an account with a bank that will let you take card numbers over the Internet. The setup fees and monthly charges I was quoted came to more than a store our size would make from it in a year. So I list what we carry and take orders by phone, the way we've taken orders from summer people for forty years. It works fine. See the nine wood-stove orders on the results page.

5. Is a free page all right for a business?
   Read the rules wherever you put it. GeoCities.us answers this one right in its Help Center: small businesses are welcome to describe their products and services. That's exactly what a hardware store page does. Nobody has ever written to me to say a free page made us look small. We are small.

6. Do you need your own .com?
   A name of your own is shorter to print on a bag, and that's worth something. But it costs money every year, and somebody has to set it up and keep it paid. I decided our address was long but it was ours and it was free, and I've never regretted it. If you do get one, put the renewal date on the same calendar as the fire extinguisher inspection.

7. What will it cost you in evenings?
   This is the real price, and nobody tells you. The building took me about twelve hours. Keeping it up runs me fifty minutes or so a week, mostly answering mail. I kept track in a notebook, and the totals are on the results page. If you haven't got an evening a week, you haven't got a web page. You've got a sign nobody's minding.

8. Where will the photographs come from?
   I meant to have a picture of the storefront at the top of the page from the first day. Fourteen months later I don't. The first roll I shot came back gray, because I took it in February at four in the afternoon. The second roll is very good, and it's in a drawer, because I don't own a scanner and I keep forgetting to bring it to my nephew's. Figure out the photographs before you start, or plan on a page without any. A page of plain words that's correct beats a page of pictures that's wrong.

9. Are your customers on the Internet at all?
   Ask them. In April of 1998, before I built anything, I asked the first hundred customers through the door whether they had the Internet at home or at work, and made a mark on a legal pad by the register. Thirty-one said yes. Sixty-nine said no, and about a dozen of those asked me why on earth I wanted to know. Thirty-one out of a hundred was enough to go ahead, but it told me not to expect miracles, and it told me to keep the phone on the counter. (I asked again this August. The answer is on the results page.)

10. How will anybody find it?
    Putting a page up doesn't put it in front of anybody. Our address is printed on the paper bags, on the bottom of the register receipt and in our ad in the town paper, and I've sent it to the search engines. Most of the people who've written to us found us by typing the name of a part, not the name of the store, so list your merchandise in plain words, the way a customer would say it: "door gasket," not "thermal seal assembly."

11. What will you leave off?
    Prices that change every week. Sale dates you might forget to take down. Anything you'd be embarrassed to have wrong. The names of the people who work for you, unless they want to be on there, and none of mine did. And I'd leave off the store's history too, or at least put it at the bottom. People come to a store page for the hours.

12. How will you know whether it worked?
    Decide now what you'll count, and count it. I keep a spiral notebook in the drawer under the register, and every e-mail and every phone order that came from the page gets a line in it. Without that notebook I'd have told you the page was a waste of time on bad days and a gold mine on good ones, and both would have been wrong.

Back to Top

A Neighbor in the Hardware Business

One of the best store pages I've found on GeoCities.us is Hartley Hardware & Garden, a family hardware store on Main Street in Oakdale, family owned since 1962. The Hartleys have their hours, their services, a list of fall specials, and a thing I wish I'd thought of: a coupon you print out, cut out and bring in, 10% off any one item. That answers question twelve all by itself. Every coupon that comes across the counter is a customer the page brought in, and you're holding the proof in your hand.

Back to Top