Brick and Click

Brick and Click

The brick and click corporation that I am evaluating is Dover Saddlery. Dover is a company that sells apparel for horseback riders, tack (such as saddles, bridles, girths, and bits) supplies for the barn, horse, and grooming, and many other things that are used in the everyday life of a horse person. North Kingstown has a “brick” Dover location that I have visited three times. Dover also has a catalogue as well as a website.
The layout of the Dover store is very neat and organized. It is not hard to direct yourself or find things because it is very straightforward—if you are a horse person, that is. When you walk in, to the left is the tack. When you look to the right, there are several displays of breeches, coats, shirts, and rider’s apparel. Towards the back of the store are boots, helmets, grooming supplies, saddle pads, barn equipment and supplies, and other odds and ends. Although the store carries a lot of merchandise, the website literally has everything they offer from their inventory. The store location is more or less a place where they carry their most popular and much needed products.
When going to Dover’s website, www.doversaddlery.com, the main home page attracts you to different sales, new items, individual tabs for different categories of merchandise, and a search engine. Dover’s website always has amazing clearance and sale items that you do not usually see in the location store or even in the catalogue. The website has many closeout deals that the store does not offer, so there are products that are up to 75% off.
I went to the Dover store a couple of weeks ago and bought a new helmet, gloves, and hairnets. The products are the exact same as they are online, but the prices may differentiate. Online, the Charles Owen helmet that I bought is priced at $134.90; the SSG riding gloves are $17.90, and the hairnets are $2.99. These prices are very close to, if not the same as those in the store, where I actually purchased the items. The helmet is obviously going to be the most expensive because it is the main safety tool used when riding, and so it has to be a special design so that it meets safety certification standards. The gloves are middle-line gloves that I bought because they were very inexpensive and are used everyday. I needed the hairnets because at school, we are required to wear them during our lessons, and they are always worn at shows.
The prices of the online items are relatively the same as those in the store. The only item that I think is cheaper online is the SSG gloves, but only by no more than two dollars. The Charles Owen helmet was the same in the store and it goes for the hairnets as well. For a purchase like mine, I am glad that I went to the store location because it wasn’t a far drive to get to, there was not sales tax on the items, and I got to take my items home with me right then and there. If I had ordered these online, I would have had to pay for freight/shipping, tax, and would have had to wait for over a week to receive my purchases. In cases like this, I would go to the store first because it ends up being more convenient and cheaper. I would order online if I needed an item that wasn’t in the store, was an extremely cheap closeout deal, or if I wasn’t on a time crunch for when I needed my stuff.