Even though everything is available online today, but still many people still like to contact the local ones. Whether you want to go for grocery shopping, or buy your favorite dresses, or simply get a worker like carpenter, plumber, etc. Local contacts and local shops are the first options people look out for.
We were once in contact with an NYC based small business SEO service company, who told us that the market is getting saturated and all local businesses should go online for more exposure.
They might be right, but why this saturation? There are several reasons why many businesses are local. Here are a few of them.
Point of Contact
In the local businesses, you have some point of contact with whom you can directly converse. Most of the times, this point of contact is the manager sitting at the shop. Talking to that person and getting your things done seems a more better and quick approach.
On the other hand, in online businesses, you can only rely on the customer care team. There is no much facility of having a particular point of contact for a certain client or customer. This creates a lot of problems for people sometimes, when they have to repeat the same problems to the different people again and again.
More answerable
When anything goes wrong, online companies can simply turn their heads and stop replying to the customers. Although major businesses do not take this risk, still there are many customers who suffer and eventually start hating a particular company.
Local businesses usually never have to face such issues. They are much more answerable to the people, since they cannot close their stores and run away immediately. Since they are more answerable, they are much more preferred over the online businesses.
High Reliability
Even though the local businesses might be costly, and you might get good discounts online. But the local ones are more reliable as compared to online businesses. You can trust them with the quality, or even check the quality before making a purchase. This reliability often plays a major role in choosing local over online.