The majority of e-tailers lose money on every transaction for these main reasons: fulfillment costs and inexperience and lack of scale: inexperienced inventory management; high online marketing costs; and online consumer-acquisition costs.

A well-established bricks=&-mortar player joining a clicks-&-mortar partnership can enable the online partner to break even because of the offline ally’s lower fulfillment, marketing and consumer-acquisition/retention expenses.

Physical realities mean that the online conduit just isn’t practicable for some products and services, fulfillment costs putting many products at a disadvantage.