Success Stories - Rutter's Farm Stores

Rutter's Farm Stores

Information is courtesy of Rutter's Farm Stores and Convenience Store News.

C-store operators are using Web sites to sell product, drive traffic and enhance their images. Many convenience store operators are looking to new sites -- to give them a competitive edge. The Rutter's Farm Stores site, for example, is both a marketing and public relations effort, said Scott Hartman, vice president of the 54 store chain, based in York, Pennsylvania. The retailer is something of a pioneer in the fledgling C-store Web site world; it has been on line since October 1996.

The Rutter's site offers a company backgrounder such as that found on most Web sties, but also has a unique hook -- a listing of community soccer scores and team standings. "We were trying to figure out how to use the Web to get people into our stores and use it for community service," Hartman said.

The soccer project accomplished a vital objective for Rutter's -- it gave people a reason to come back to the site again and again. "That was the driving force -- to have something that would have changing information," Hartman noted.

The next most popular page on the Rutter's site is a coupon page, which is the chain's most direct effort at selling products and building traffic. Hartman is pleased with the response to this page, he said, but added, "It is not what I would call a response rate like that of an 80,000 household mailer ....but people at certain stores tend to use them regularly and it's a growing pattern."

Redemption is largely a matter of geography, he explained. In some sectors, Internet access still requires a long-distance phone call, discouraging residents from traveling the information highway.

A major component of Rutter's and other sites is the ability to communicate directly with customers. Hartman averages two to three e-mails per day and answers all personally.

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