3M’s Great New Discovery: The Internet (MMM)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Aug 18, 9:56AM EDT · Published Jul 10, 4:56PM EDT

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3M (NYSE:MMM) is just today announcing the launch of its own eStore. If you look through the press release it has all the reminders of 1999 when companies merely issued a press release saying "We Have An Internet Strategy" and seeing the share rise 10%. The difference is that 3M is a major conglomerate that should have figured this out by now. Almost every manufacturer has figured out that "Selling Direct Online" is not noticeable for a while to distributors and has become an acceptable cost of business. The only funny thing is that they are still going likely to send you to a downstream store or center to buy the products and keep it more informational.

It is almost funny when you look at the press release. The company claims it is responding to customers’ expressed wishes for easy access to the company’s broad range of industrial products, 3M has created the 3M eStore. At the new site, customers in the 48 contiguous United States (guess Alaska and Hawaii still have to call around for Post-It notes) can purchase from a large and growing selection of 3M products with a simple credit card transaction.

By opening the 3M eStore, its products are in more locations where our customers can purchase them. 3M will connect customers directly to authorized distributors to set up an ongoing relationship so customers can find and purchase 3M products the way they want.

The website is www. 3MeStore.com and it’s sort of amazing that this hasn’t been up for, oh, anout 7 or 8 years by now.

Jon C. Ogg
July 10, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.