In the center of Buffalo Creek, Colorado—a town in the eastern Rocky Mountains that is as small as it sounds—is the J.W. Green Mercantile. It just celebrated a 100 year anniversary as a grocery-tackle-camping supply store. It is also the gas station, the post office, and in the summer, when people cluster around the big chest freezers sucking popsicles and gossiping—it is the community of Buffalo Creek. There is a fancy Texaco station within an hour at Pine Junction and a big Safeway a little farther away in Conifer, but the mercantile thrives.

Why? Several reasons: it is central for most people in the valley around Buffalo Creek; it provides personal service; and it has established itself as essential to the community on several levels. When you are ready to build your storefront—or storefronts—on the Internet, you can learn a lot from the J.W. Green Mercantile. The same qualities of centrality, personal service, and community can assure your success on the electronic frontier.

1. Central Location

Part of the convenience of the Mercantile is its central location. In fact the community often ends up being convenient to its main store, building itself in proximity to the supplies it needs. Establishing yourself in the center of that community is essential. There are very few mercantile communities.

On the Colorado frontier, dividing the resources of a small town between two stores in similar locations carrying the same products from the same suppliers isn't logical or necessary. Better to do what the Pine Emporium did, and establish yourself farther away, building a second community center. And over the years, as the practical distance between the stores decreased, the Emporium has evolved to serve different community needs and a different market: tourist items like postcards and maps and crafts made by local artists.

On the Internet, communities are built not on geographic proximity but common interests: cooking, reading, music, investment. You have the advantage of determining your ideal customer, and then establishing a community to serve them that is central to their interests.

The online version of the Pine Emporium, for example, would want to build a community based on Colorado visitors. It might serve up maps, historical information, and hotel listings as well as products. It might establish relationships with the Meadow Creek Bed and Breakfast down the road, or with the Buck Snort Saloon up the hill. The information and relationships build virtual highways, channeling customers to the Emporium as surely as if it were an off ramp of a physical highway.

2. Personal Service

Because the Green Mercantile is central to the community, it can also personalize its offerings. It is able to recognize and fulfill community needs quickly and thoroughly, weaving itself into the fabric of the town so that even casual conversations become opportunities to learn about and better serve their customers. When the mercantile adapts to a family's disdain for fake maple syrup on their pancakes or one fisherwoman's adherence to a particular bait, the relationship established narrows the distance between shop and customer. The "main" road between home and the lake will always be the one the good bait is on.

In your online store, personalized service is just as possible. In fact, it is an asset often lost in brick and mortar super chains. Best Buy's Idea Box, Burger King's "Have It Your Way" campaign—these are attempts to recapture a feeling of personalized service in the midst of mass marketing. But on the Internet, the nature of the storefront is its centrality to the particular community that surrounds it. It is easier to create points of contact and interaction like bulletin boards, surveys and message boxes that make personal service a part of the process.

3. Community

These feedback points are part of facilitating community, building relationships around and through your store. The Mercantile is a central information and administration point—it is where everyone goes to get their mail, catch up on events from road closures to forest fire reports, and talk. By building community on several levels, the Mercantile provides several reasons to visit that go beyond product purchasing.

An online community server is focused on the same elements: information and interaction. The Pine Emporium Web site, for example, might have the maps and hotel information posted. It might also have a schedule of the planetarium hours, the fund raising sales for the North Fork Volunteer Fire Department, and the music at the Buck Snort. It could have a bulletin board where tourists interested in visiting the area could write locals for advice or children could write the old-timers questions about the old days, when the train from Denver still came through the valley. The interaction points and information will mean that your customers will come, will return, and will stay longer when they visit, as surely as the people in Buffalo Creek would never dream of buying their ice cream anywhere else.

At first glance, the Internet seems very different from standard retail channels. The technology and the scale of the market are initially very daunting. The element that has made Amazon.com, Cooking.com, Garden.com, etc. so successful is the understanding that behind that ocean of computers are the same customers you have always served. They have the same priorities of convenience, personalized service, and interaction. Your ability to draw them in, focus on them, and create a long-term relationship is based on the community you create around your business. The technology becomes an asset, and the market becomes a town, full of real people enjoying the convenience, comfort, and companionship of an 'old-fashioned' mercantile.

—Rhiannon Jones

Rhiannon Jones is the owner of Digital Geographer, a company that applies real-world community-building to the online environment, and has worked with companies that have implemented the Townsmith Suite, including Delta Road.