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Bricks and clicks (aka clicks and bricks, click and mortar, or bricks, clicks and flips) is a business model by which a company integrates both offline (bricks) and online (clicks) presences, sometimes with the third extra flips (physical catalogs). Additionally, many will also offer telephone ordering as well, or at least provide telephone sales support.
A popular example of the bricks and clicks model is when a chain of stores allows the customer to order products either online or physically in one of their stores, also allowing them to either pick-up their order directly at a local branch of the store or get it delivered to their home. There are many alternative combinations of this model.
The bricks and clicks model has typically been used by traditional retailers who have extensive logistics and supply chains, but are well known and often respected for their traditional physical presence. Part of the reason for its success is that it is far easier for a traditional retailer to establish an online presence, than it is for a start-up company to employ a successful purely online one, or for an online only retailer to establish a traditional presence, including a strong and well recognised brand, without having a large marketing budget.^{[citation needed]} Although the major factor in the success or failure of this business model is in the control of costs, as usually maintaining a physical presence —paying for many physical store premises and their staffing— requires larger capital expenditure which online only businesses do not usually have. Some business sectors may lend themselves better to a bricks and clicks model than others. For example, supermarkets often have different customers types requiring alternative shopping options; one group may wish to see the goods directly before purchase and like the convenience of quickly shopping on-the-fly, while another group may require a different convenience of shopping online and getting the order delivered when it suits them. Conversely, a business selling more luxurious, often expensive, or only occasionally purchased products —like cars— may find sales are more common with a physical presence, due to the more considered nature of the purchasing decision, though they may still offer online product information.
The success of the model in many sectors has lessened the credibility of some analysts who argued that the Internet would render traditional retailers obsolete through disintermediation.^{[citation needed]}
"On the other hand, an online-only service can remain a best-in-class operation because its executives focus on just the online business." It has been argued that a bricks and clicks business model is more difficult to implement than an online only model.^[1] In the future, the bricks and clicks model may be more successful, but in 2010 some online only businesses grew at a staggering 30%, while some bricks and clicks businesses grew at a paltry 3%.^[2] The key factor for a bricks and clicks business model to be successful "will, to a large extent, be determined by a company’s ability to manage the trade-offs between separation and integration" of their retail and online businesses.^[3]


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