Is a pamphlet enough?

So I'm looking for a microwave. I whip out Google and start my search. Up pops a bunch of sites, excluding the furnisher place just down the road.

Because they would be so convenient, I search for their site, open it up and find a pamphlet! No exciting gems of information which make me hotfoot it down there in order to find myself a miriad of ways to buy a bunch of stuff I can't justify. Just a pamphlet!

Not a list of products or a way of searching for my needs. Just a pamphlet!

What a let down. Which got me wondering, how can a store which labels itself "the largest independent furniture and appliance dealer in the Western Cape" so miss out on a sales opportunity? Why on earth did they bother to create a web site?

How can they have totally missed the point that business has changed? People no longer go window-shopping on a Saturday afternoon. The Internet is replacing brick and morter.

You want to buy something? You Google (or Bing or Yahoo) the product and are promptly presented with a list of products available from suppliers near you. Most of these suppliers even give you an opportunity to make the purchase without leaving your desk, with the product being delivered to your door.

Even if a site does not offer online purchasing, most present an overwhelming richness of interactive information for each of the models they can supply; I click here for a rotatable picture; I click there for a comparison of makes and models; I'm shown how many are in stock in each branch.

But what does the "largest appliance dealer" give me? A pamphlet! A pamphlet which didn't even include any microwaves, even although they do sell them.

It's not as though designing a site which provides a basic product catalogue would be beyond the abilities of a grade nine web designer, or that keeping it up to date will break the budget.

Even a downloadable PDF document generated from their stock database would be better than nothing. But I guess one can't generate a PDF from an abacus.

Is just a pamphlet enough? No. They lost my custom and probably that of many others for whom the search engine passed them by. I wonder how many others are also missing out.