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Bill Sites, owner of Sites Jewelers in Clarksville, Tennessee, is a retailer who has already signed up as a GemFind.com affiliate. “It’s just another opportunity for us to get in front of our customers,” he says. “I don’t think it will ever take the place of a consumer or a client walking through our front door and visiting our store, but consumers are on-line every day. It’s about offering access and good customer service.”

While customers will have the option of buying jewelry on-line from their local retailer on GemFind.com, the goal is to drive traffic to the stores rather than become an on-line retailer, emphasizes McCartney. Several hundred jewelers have already signed up and staked out their local protected “territory” in advance of the site’s launch, which is projected to be no later than the end of December. For more information about GemFind.com, retailers can visit www.seeitfirst.info.

The Independent Jewelers Organization, which represents more than 800 independent retailers across the U.S., has also developed an on-line business that basically encourages customers not to buy on-line, but instead to head into a brick-and-mortar store. On IJOdiamonds.com, which debuted in 2006, consumers can select diamonds and have them delivered to a local store for a personal inspection before laying out any money. The diamonds come directly from a wide variety of wholesalers and if the customer wants the stone the store shares a portion of the selling price with the wholesaler. If not, the stone goes back to the wholesaler and the customer pays nothing.

“It’s been going well so far, certainly,” says Mary Moses Kinney, IJO’s merchandising director. However, she admits, “it’s hard for us to measure exactly which sales come off of IJOdiamonds.com and which are made with IJO vendors through conventional methods.” She does say that members have reported positively about the site on IJO discussion boards. The tagline for the site, “A professional wouldn’t buy a stone without looking at it, and neither should you,” says it all. Kinney says, “The idea is to get the customer in the store, not to compete unrealistically with Blue Nile.”

THE NEXT GENERATION

Finally, some retailers have taken the task of finding alternative ways to market on-line on themselves, by taking a stab at creating pages on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Widely perceived as a way to connect with young consumers, some retailers warn that these sites are not necessarily a place to sell a lot of product, though others claim to have seen significant sales as a result of this kind of presence.

Steve Gerencser of Images Jewelers in Elkhart, Indiana, is a rare commodity for an independent retailer: a tech-savvy jeweler. Formerly in charge of network maintenance for the store, Gerencser realized he’d rather make custom jewelry than work on computers, but he still helps out with everything tech-related, including the store’s Facebook page. “The main reason I started a Facebook page for the store is because Google is now crawling the pages,” he says. That means that the page has the potential to help the store’s web page with search engine placement.

Images has a blog on its web site, which also helps with its ranking. “It’s all about Google and traffic,” Gerencser says, which is something he is very knowledgeable about—after all, Images Jewelers is the first Google result if you type in the keywords “custom jewelry.” “I know a lot of people in various industries and getting business out of Facebook is a challenge. I think there are better ways to spend your energy if your purpose is to drive business on-line.”