What is a Brick-and-Mortar Business? (2025 Guide)

Why would anyone abandon the comfort of one-click checkout for fluorescent lights and a parking lot? Because despite all the hype around two-hour delivery, brick-and-mortar businesses still account for 83.8% of the US retail pie. 

In the first quarter of 2025, ecommerce grabbed 16.2% of sales, up a respectable 6.1% from the same quarter last year—but total retail grew too, rising 4.5%. 

In other words, digital is growing alongside physical stores, not replacing them.

Ahead, you’ll learn how to open a brick-and-mortar store, hear from real-world success stories, and look at the trends shaping the future of brick-and-mortar retail.

But first, a refresher.

What is a brick-and-mortar business?

A brick-and-mortar business is a company that operates from a physical storefront: the kind you can walk into, browse around, and leave with a shopping bag in hand. 

Whether that’s a 3,000-square-foot flagship store or a hole-in-the-wall sandwich counter with room for six stools—if there’s a door you can walk through, it’s brick and mortar.

But in 2025, that definition comes with layers. Retail stores have moved beyond browsing and ringing up sales. They’re now part of a larger retail ecosystem in which the same space might:

• Act as a fulfillment hub: Picking, packing, and shipping orders made online to speed up delivery
• Double as a showroom: Letting customers see and try products they’ll later buy from your website
• Serve as a pickup point: For customers who want to skip shipping fees or get their order today
• Host experiences: Workshops, product demos, popups, or community events that draw people in

In short, a brick-and-mortar establishment isn’t really the opposite of ecommerce—rather, it’s the offline touchpoint in an omnichannel strategy. Your store becomes something customers can’t replicate through a screen: the handshake, the instant gratification, the “I didn’t plan to buy this but now I am” moment.

The evolution of brick-and-mortar retail

The retail businesses you know today are brand experiences, service hubs, and local logistics nodes—all rolled into a single in-person shopping experience.

But how did we get here?

Retail began as street stalls and open-air bazaars. In 1852, Le Bon Marché in Paris emerged as the world’s first true department store.

Fast forward to 1916 in Memphis, and Clarence Saunders launched Piggly Wiggly, the first self‑service supermarket, revolutionizing grocery shopping by letting customers pick their own items. This innovation turned retail into something you do, not just something you watch.

The 1920s pushed retail forward. Women were entering the workforce, managing household budgets, and becoming primary decision-makers for everyday spending. Stores responded with more variety, better displays, and store layouts that encouraged browsing. 

Advertising matured, introducing brand loyalty and emotional appeal, leading to chain stores like Woolworth’s expanding rapidly across US cities with standardized storefronts and low fixed prices.

After World War II, the model grew even stronger. The rise of the suburbs—and the spread of cars—sparked the shopping mall boom in the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1970, electronic data interchange (EDI) emerged, allowing retailers and suppliers to send purchase orders, invoices, and shipping updates electronically. A year later, Intel launched its first commercial microprocessor, laying the foundation for in-store computing, digital cash registers, and eventually, inventory automation.

And while it sounds apocryphal, a 1972 ARPANET experiment between Stanford and MIT students—allegedly to arrange a cannabis sale—has been cited as the first recorded instance of ecommerce, according to John Markoff's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

The 1980s introduced the first real teleshopping prototype. Michael Aldrich, a British inventor, connected a TV to a real-time transaction-processing system via a telephone line. With it, users could browse items onscreen, place an order, and trigger fulfillment.

Aldrich’s invention didn’t scale like the internet later would, but it introduced a now-familiar idea: browse, select, buy—from anywhere.

The 1990s brought retail into the internet era, yet stores stayed central. Retailers began experimenting with online extensions of physical locations. 

In 1995, Amazon launched as an online bookstore. eBay followed the same year. Legacy retailers like Walmart and Best Buy quickly invested in web storefronts, creating some of the first hybrid retail models.

At the same time, loyalty programs went digital, as chains like CVS and Target began using data to track in-store behavior and personalize promotions.

By the 2000s, “multichannel” became the retail buzzword. In 2009, Best Buy introduced “Reserve Online, Pickup In-Store”—one of the first national chains to formalize what is now known as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS).

PayPal exploded in usage after its eBay acquisition in 2002, boosting consumer confidence in digital payments—even for in-store pickup. Around the same time, the first mobile POS systems appeared, with Apple Stores leading the way by using iPhones and iPads to complete sales on the floor.

The 2010s were when “omnichannel” went from buzzword to table stakes. Mobile commerce exploded—but instead of cannibalizing stores, it drove more informed in-store visits.
Shoppers checked prices, read reviews, and looked for promo codes while standing in the aisle.

Digitally native brands like Warby Parker, Glossier, Bonobos, and Allbirds opened popups, showrooms, and then permanent stores, proving online-first didn’t have to mean online-only.

Apple Pay (2014) and Google Wallet (2011) turned smartphones into contactless wallets, reshaping how people paid in-store.

And perhaps most importantly, social media stopped being only a marketing channel—it became a sales channel. By the late 2010s, platforms like Instagram and Facebook rolled out native shopping features, letting users browse and buy without leaving the app.

That’s where we are now—more on the future later.

Types of brick-and-mortar stores

Not all brick-and-mortar stores serve the same purpose—or cater to the same shoppers. Some are built for browsing, some for bulk buys, and others for quick, in-and-out essentials.

Here are the major formats that continue to anchor physical retail.

Traditional retail categories

Let’s start with the classics: department stores, specialty shops, grocery chains, and corner-store staples.

Department stores

Saks, Macy’s, and Nordstrom are all examples of brick-and-mortar department stores. As cities grow, so does the opportunity for retail. By 2025, urban residents will account for $20 trillion in annual global economic output. Retailers who want a slice of that pie need to be where the people are—and increasingly, that means investing in dense, walkable locations with curated assortments and connected experiences.

Specialty stores

Brick-and-mortar businesses like Home Depot, CVS, and Petco all specialize in one product category—whether it’s home improvement items, cosmetics, or pet food. In most cases, shoppers visit specialty stores with an item already in mind. 

Despite pressure from big-box retailers and tariffs, small specialty retailers are growing. Revenue is expected to rise at a 4.0% CAGR, reaching $68.4 billion by the end of 2025.

Specialty stores are leaning into location strategy: the US Southeast now has the highest concentration of specialty retail locations, thanks to its population density.

Grocery stores

Grocery stores are another example of brick-and-mortar retail. Brands like Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and Costco have physical stores in most states. In-store grocery shoppers spent an average of 23.4 minutes per visit in 2024, down only slightly from previous years.

Convenience stores

Convenience stores are small retail businesses that are typically open long hours and found in easily accessible locations. They carry a range of everyday items like groceries, snack foods, confectionery, toiletries, soft drinks, tobacco products, and newspapers, often at slightly higher prices due to their convenience. The convenience stores market grew from $2.28 trillion in 2024 to $2.39 trillion in 2025.

Emerging and popular store concepts

Here are four innovative store models that are lighting up real-world retail today:

Experience-led retail spaces

Experience-first retail brings together tactile moments, tech-enhanced demos, and that little feeling of "Wow, I didn’t expect that."

Take Heathrow Airport. In August 2025, they launched a campaign called Redefine Your Beauty across all four terminals. They built dedicated Beauty Bars offering live masterclasses, fragrance engraving, and skin analysis stations. In Terminal 5, travelers could relax with free La Mer facials and Molton Brown massages before boarding.

Gaming lounges

Hobby retail is having a real-world revival. The appeal is simple: people want to play inside a shopping experience. Gaming lounges deliver recurring footfall, social buzz, and high-margin add-ons.

Game Nite in Memphis is a great example. Tucked away on South Cooper Street, this lounge is the brainchild of the team behind Amuse: The Adventure Museum and Memphis Escape Rooms. Inside, you’ll find 10 themed rooms designed like cozy living spaces. Game sessions run from 45 minutes to 3.5 hours, and prices range from $27.99 to $54.99 per person.

Niche cafes

In a city full of flat whites and minimalist menus, sometimes the smartest move is to go all in on character. Literally.

Enter Australia’s first Hello Kitty Café, inside Melbourne Central. It’s split into four themed spaces, each celebrating Hello Kitty and her friends—Cinnamoroll, Kuromi, My Melody, and the icon herself.

Advantages and disadvantages of a physical store

Opening a physical store is a high-effort move that can give your brand credibility, visibility, and tactile value—if it’s done right. Here's a clear-eyed look at what brick-and-mortar gets you, and what it demands in return.

Advantages of the brick-and-mortar model

First, a look at the promise of a brick-and-mortar retail business:

Reach customers who don’t shop online

Even in 2025, not everyone shops online; global internet penetration sits at about 67%. And even among those who shop online, plenty still prefer to buy in person—especially for products that need trying, testing, or sizing. 

“Retail offers us a market that we wouldn’t access online,” says Esther Babayov, marketing director of The Suit Depot. “There are just certain demographics that prefer to shop in person—such as older customers, customers who are unsure of their size, customers who are looking for something super specific, etc.—and if we were only online we would be missing out on all of those opportunities to serve those customers.”

Deliver better customer experiences

You can’t smell a candle or test a mattress through a screen, no matter how good AI try-on technologies have become. In-store shopping gives people a multi-sensory experience, and it’s often the only way to build confidence in a high-consideration product.

Brands like lampshade retailer Candid Owl, which opened a physical location after strong online growth, found that customers wanted to feel the fabrics and visualize products in their homes. 

“We opened our first brick-and-mortar store last year,” says Candice Small, founder of Candid Owl. “Whilst successfully selling our product online, we were increasingly receiving requests from our customers to open a showroom/retail unit to enable them to visit and experience our products in person. Our customers can now touch, feel, and experience our fabrics in person to select their bespoke lampshades with confidence that they will suit their home décor.”

Mattress retailer Casper is another retailer that combines customer experiences with their brick-and-mortar stores. They launched The Dreamery back in 2018 for busy New Yorkers to visit the store and pay $25 for a quick nap in a Casper bed. 

Blend online and offline for more flexibility

As of 2024, 97.2 million Americans regularly use buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), accounting for 34.2% of all US consumers. That’s one in three shoppers who expect to browse from their couch and pick up down the street. If you’re only selling online, you’re missing out on customers who don’t want to wait for shipping or don’t trust doorstep delivery. 

One way to combine online and in-person shopping is known as “click and mortar” or phygital retail. In this case, people order the item through an online retailer and head to their physical store to collect the item. 

Earl of East is one retailer that used click and mortar to keep their physical store open during the pandemic. Customers downloaded a mobile app to order their food and drinks, and the store was open during the day for collection.

Disadvantages of the brick-and-mortar model

A physical retail presence comes with trade-offs:

Inventory management is more complicated

Running a store means keeping physical stock—and getting that wrong costs money. 

Overstocking means storage issues and markdowns; understocking means lost sales. In 2024, US retailers saw $890 billion in returned merchandise, accounting for 16.9% of total retail sales, according to the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns.

The margin of error is smaller than it looks. 

High operational costs 

Online businesses can often get away with a laptop and a supply chain. But with physical stores, you’ve got rent, salaries, point-of-sale (POS) systems, utilities, insurance, signage, security, cleaning, and maintenance—and that’s just month one.

While retail rents are up just 1.8% year-over-year nationally, many major metros are seeing much higher growth, and wages for retail workers now average $17 per hour, with rates higher in major cities.

Competition is tough (and everywhere)

Your physical store is competing with the shop down the street, with Amazon, with TikTok shops, and ecommerce-only brands with zero physical overhead and nationwide reach.

Walmart and Target have made BOPIS standard. Sephora’s store design has become the template for experience-first beauty retail. And digitally native brands like Allbirds and Glossier are now playing the brick-and-mortar game, too.

That means you can’t win on price or scale: you’ve got to win on curation, service, speed, and specificity.

Brick-and-mortar vs. ecommerce: Key differences

Brick-and-mortar has been around for centuries, and what keeps it relevant is immediacy, sensory experience, and real human interaction. Customers can see, touch, try, and take their purchase home instantly.

Ecommerce, on the other hand, offers convenience and scale. You can buy a pair of shoes at 2 am from your couch and have them delivered to your door the next day. That flexibility is part of why global ecommerce sales are projected to hit $6.3 trillion in 2025.

Both models have strengths and inevitable shortcomings. Here's how they compare at a glance:

How to open your first brick-and-mortar store

Let’s walk through six steps you can take to open your first brick-and-mortar business.

1. Find the right location

Where you open matters just as much as what you sell. The right brick-and-mortar location puts your brand in front of the right people—people who are already shopping, browsing, and spending.

Take Footwear retailer Rothy’s, for example. The brand has five brick-and-mortar stores across the US. CEO Stephen Hawthornthwaite explains the brand chose cities with a healthy blend of both existing and potential new customers.

“From there, we look for a neighborhood that’s full of character, walkable, and offers a mix of retail, restaurants, and cultural activities,” he says. 

If you’re a Shopify retailer, use tools like Shopify POS Analytics and Shopify Audiences to help identify where your most engaged customers already are. You can also filter your reports by location to decide where to expand next based on regional buying behavior.

📚Read: 7 Retail Locations to Consider for Your Store

2. Choose a point-of-sale (POS) system

Your POS is your store’s brain. With Shopify POS, you get a system that syncs seamlessly with your online store, tracks every sale across all locations, and gives your staff access to customer profiles, purchase history, and product availability—right from the register.

Shopify is built to keep your inventory, orders, and customer data in sync across every channel: storefront, online, warehouse, and popups.

• Unified channels: Manage your full inventory from one dashboard no matter where the sale happens.
• Multiple locations: Stock levels update in real time with every sale, return, exchange, or transfer.
• Real-time visibility: Sell seamlessly across channels with a system that talks to itself. 

Shopify’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is up to 36% lower than competing platforms. That includes software, hardware, payments, support, and everything in between.

Plus, with Shopify Tap to Pay, a handheld mobile POS works on your phone—perfect for sidewalk sales, in-aisle checkout, or popups with no tech headaches.

Whether you're opening your first store or adding a second (or third), Shopify POS gives you one system to run them all.

3. Hire and train retail associates

Your store’s vibe depends on the people running it. Your team should know your products, your brand voice, and how to offer support that doesn’t feel pushy.

Shopify makes this easier with staff permissions in POS, so employees can access what they need—inventory, customer info, sales tools—without messing with back-end settings. Shopify POS also lets you assign each sale—or individual items within a sale—to a specific staff member, either from the cart or directly from the smart grid. If you offer commissions or want to track sales performance, you can use the built-in Retail sales by staff attributed to sales report.

Pet supply retailer Tomlinson’s struggled with a clunky POS that slowed checkouts and made staff training a headache. After switching to Shopify POS, they cut training time by 32%—speeding up onboarding and streamlining store operations.

“There was no downtime when we made the switch to Shopify POS,” says Kate Knecht, owner and operator. “We were able to train in a sandbox environment for a month and a half prior to the launch to allow our team to get used to the system.”

4. Manage inventory

The biggest mistake first-time store owners make is not syncing their inventory across channels. 

Shopify makes it easy to stay on top of inventory. 

• Track stock levels, get alerts before products run out, and see the reason for inventory changes—all from your Inventory dashboard. 
• Need to restock or adjust levels? Do it in just a few clicks. 
• You can also dig into inventory reports to spot trends and avoid stockouts before they happen.

💡 Pro tip: Use ship-to-customer fulfillment to turn your store into an endless aisle. If an item’s out of stock at one location, don’t lose the sale—sell it in-store and ship it from your warehouse or another store that has inventory. It’s convenient for the customer, and you get to keep the revenue.

Footwear brand Allbirds uses this exact feature to close sales for out-of-stock items. It lets them maintain high store conversion rates across more than 35 locations—without overloading every store with full inventory.

5. Experiment with popup shops

A pop-up shop with a clear end date creates urgency that feels real. It taps into FOMO—the fear of missing out—something that drives 60% of millennial purchases. When customers know your popup won’t be there next week, they’re far more likely to walk in—and walk out with something.

If you’re using popups to test temporary locations, Shopify gives you the tools to launch fast and sell like a full-time store:

• Multiple location support: Track inventory and performance by popup location, separate from your main store or online channel.
• Unified customer profiles: Every popup sale is linked to a customer profile, so you can follow up with email marketing, offers, or personalized service later.
• Staff permissions: Add temporary staff with limited access for the duration of the event, without giving them full admin access.

Eyeglass brand Warby Parker started as an online retailer, then tested a physical presence with a popup in a bus. The result was a wildly successful retail experiment. Today, they operate over 230 storefronts—and counting.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Warby Parker (@warbyparker)

6. Merge in-store shopping with ecommerce

A customer might scroll your Instagram on their phone, check a product’s availability on your site, visit your store to try it on, and then place an order from their laptop later that night.

That’s why unified commerce is your competitive edge. BizTech magazine recently dubbed unified commerce as the “future of seamless retail.”

With Shopify, you can offer:

• Local pickup and delivery: Offer flexible fulfillment options from the same dashboard. Let shoppers choose local pickup at checkout or get their order delivered from the store closest to them.
• Returns and exchanges at any location: With Shopify POS and your Shopify admin, your staff can handle returns and exchanges across all locations, regardless of where the item was bought.
• Gift cards and loyalty rewards that work across all channels: Gift cards bought online can be used in-store. Loyalty rewards earned in person can be redeemed online. Shopify keeps it all in sync.

Customers don’t care which system you use—they just want everything to work.

Examples of successful brick-and-mortar businesses

Forget the old mall model. Today’s most successful physical stores blend smart tech, bold storytelling, and a customer experience you can’t scroll past.

Wildling

Wildling is a German shoe retailer that opened their first brick-and-mortar showroom last year. They use Shopify POS, which fully integrates with their ecommerce platform, to show real-time stock availability, manage inventory, and track orders. 

Since launching their first showroom with this setup, Wildling saw 50% more first-time shoppers in their physical showrooms.

Beauty Heroes

Beauty Heroes was a successful ecommerce retailer that wanted to open their first brick-and-mortar store. They combined the two channels—online and offline—using a single POS system. 

The launch of their first brick-and-mortar store was a success. The Beauty Heroes team saved hours reconciling customer information across both channels—instead using that valuable data to retarget and analyze.

Burberry

Luxury retailer Burberry opened their first brick-and-mortar store in Shenzhen, China, in 2020. But unlike most retailers, they didn’t open the store with the vision of selling more merchandise. 

Instead, they prioritized delivering immersive retail experiences for their customers.

Burberry’s WeChat mini-program incentivizes customers to share their experiences on social media in return for social currency that can be redeemed for exclusive content. This gives the brick-and-mortar store an online presence, too. 

Peak Design

Peak Design started with one idea: make camera gear easier to carry. Today, the brand sells globally through their Shopify-powered site, retail stores in New York, San Francisco, and Japan, and a growing network of wholesale partners.

In stores, Peak Design’s team offers guided, hands-on help. But at first, with a fixed checkout setup, that service hit a wall—staff had to dart back and forth between shoppers and registers, creating bottlenecks and friction.

Since implementing Shopify’s handheld POS Go devices, staff can now:

• Look up inventory on the spot
• Check customers out from anywhere
• Keep the experience smooth, efficient, and entirely mobile

Framebridge

Since launching in 2014, Framebridge has redefined custom framing with a sleek online sales experience. But once they set their sights on rapid retail expansion, they needed a platform that could keep up.

For nearly a decade, Framebridge ran on a homegrown, open-source platform. But that meant more time patching tech—and less time building the seamless experience they wanted.

After replatforming to Shopify, Framebridge now runs more than 30 retail stores and manages over 250 employees—all from one system, all built to provide a great customer experience. And they’ve seen the numbers to back it up:

• 15.3% increase in add-to-cart rate
• 8.1% increase in checkout-started rate
• 7.5% increase in conversion rate

Jenni Kayne

Jenni Kayne built her namesake brand into a California lifestyle empire—starting with clothing and footwear, then expanding into home furnishings (Jenni Kayne Home) and skincare (Oak Essentials).

From the beginning, the brand prioritized omnichannel connection. But as new product lines and store openings accelerated, it became clear they needed a platform that could scale with them.

Since migrating to Shopify Plus and Shopify POS, Jenni Kayne has:

• More than doubled their brick-and-mortar retail footprint
• Unified customer profiles across channels to drive deeper engagement
• Removed friction for staff when checking inventory across stores and ecommerce
• Streamlined quote creation for Trade Program partners with branded imagery and product details

“Shopify has helped us fulfill our omnichannel vision and provide a customer experience that is smooth and seamless.” —Sam Mella, Director of Home Experience, Jenni Kayne

Mejuri

Mejuri was built to break the old rules of luxury, making fine jewelry accessible for everyday wear. What began as a DTC brand now spans 45 stores across four countries, blending online reach with tactile, in-person experiences like piercings and styling sessions.

But with growth came friction. A custom tech stack slowed Mejuri’s ability to move fast and innovate. So they switched to Shopify’s unified commerce platform. Since replatforming, Mejuri has:

• Migrated both ecommerce and POS in under nine months
• Slashed tech overhead and maintenance costs
• Transformed stores into fulfillment hubs with dynamic order routing
• Accelerated global expansion, starting with their Sydney store

The future of brick-and-mortar retail: Trends to watch

Forget the retail industry apocalypse headlines. Brick-and-mortar is getting smarter, greener, and way more fun to shop in. Here’s what the next wave of in-person retail looks like:

Hyperpersonalized, location-aware experiences

According to surveys, 65.6% of consumers say digital in-store media increases their spending.

Consumers who start their journey online increasingly expect that digital breadcrumb trail to follow them into the store. With tools like in-store beacons, brands can push personalized offers to shoppers’ smartphones as they pass by, tailored to browsing history or abandoned carts. 

Once inside, that personalization continues through digital signage that adapts to age and gender, or smart mirrors that let customers virtually try on outfits. 

Sustainability as a growth strategy

Consumers are willing to pay a 9.7% premium for sustainable products, even amid inflation and rising living costs.

Ocado Retail’s innovation in UK packaging offers a glimpse of what's possible. As the first UK grocer to scale packaging traceability with invisible UV tags, Ocado now gets real-time data on where and when their packaging is recycled—starting with their entire private-label milk range.

The system, built in partnership with Polytag, is live across over 100 Ocado products and supported by a network of plastic-detection units that cover nearly 50% of the UK’s household recycling stream.

💡Note: Green retail will be a big focus for the 2025 RTIH Innovation Awards.

The AI boom is coming to a store near you

According to Gartner’s 2025 CIO Agenda leaders expect their 2025 budgets to jump by 34% for generative AI, 33% for artificial intelligence overall, and 31% for business intelligence and analytics.

Retailers like Walmart-owned Sam’s Club are experimenting with tech-powered checkout verification using exit cameras instead of receipt checks. Others, like retailers using J.P. Morgan Payments, are testing biometric payments: think facial recognition or palm scans at the register.

The retailers that lean into experimentation are the ones most likely to pull ahead.