We've been a brick and mortar seller for decades and are coming off our best year ever this in 2007 with an even better year in 2008. However when we go to the shows all we hear is distributors crying about the online distributors. We've lost a few customers to low price shopping but easily replaced them with higher margin clients.
Take a look at your sales agreements with your suppliers. Some are now enforcing price fixing policies while ignoring the damage being done by online and offline distributors selling through shell companies. This is the real potential harm we can compete against individual distributors but competing against a beehive of false storefronts is really getting tough.
Simple way to fix it require each distributor to sign an agreement saying they'll only operate one site.