We Play in Traffic

If your retail business sells products that can be shipped, you either currently do ecommerce, or you’ve thought about it.  Ecommerce can expand your business, but it takes a commitment of time, effort, and money to set up.

So along comes Tribune Media Services with its new online offering: Theyard.com intends to be an online “superstore” where individual retailers can post products for sale through the web with little effort.

It looks like it’s still in beta, but it here’s how it appears to work:

• Any store can include in the listings of products for sale via theyard.com from one item to thousands, via either a manual upload of information, or a datafeed.
• Consumer can search and buy products on theyard.com
• Tribune Media handles the money interface with the consumer
• At the end of each month Tribune Media debits your account or a credit card you have provided for each of your products that have been sold through theyard.com
• They take a 5% share of the sale (plus processing fees) of all completed transactions.
• Your store handles fulfillment and shipping.

This sounds great.  But I was at a predecessor to theyard.com, and let me tell you the flaw for local retailers: unless you’re selling something obscure that no one else offers, your few listings will get lost among the pages of listings of larger retailers.

Theyard.com exists for Tribune Media to make money.  That’s cool.  If it becomes successful and attracts more visitors, more retailers will want to use it.  In fact, retailers with large data feeds will provide products.  And that’s good for consumers because they’ll have a better experience.

But if you’re a local retailer trying to find a site to make a few bucks off ecommerce, that’s what you’ll make with theyard.com.  A few bucks.  Individual listings are likely to get lost and won’t sell much. Unless the search algorithms driving theyard.com are good, and you have an obscure product that doesn’t have a lot of competition for other retailers.

Theyard.com is an interesting idea, but as with others that have tried this, it will likely get caught in that netherworld between being a resource for local retailers and being another ecommerce website like any other.