Brick and mortar

For other uses, see Brick and mortar (disambiguation).

This article is about the e-commerce concept. For brick and mortar construction, see Brickwork.

Brick and mortar (bricks and mortar or B&M) in its simplest usage describes the physical presence of a building(s) or other structure. It's a concept usually referred to in business, which applies to the physical location for a business or organization.

Brick and mortar business

The term brick and mortar business (bricks and mortar business or B&M business) is often used to refer to a company that possesses a building or store for operations. The name is a metonym derived from the traditional building materials associated with physical buildings — bricks and mortar. Its first use was in 1992.

More specifically, in the jargon of eCommerce businesses, brick and mortar businesses are companies that have a physical presence and offer face-to-face customer experiences. This term is usually used to contrast with a transitory business or an internet-only presence, such as an online shop, which have no physical presence for shoppers to visit and buy from directly, though such online businesses normally have non-public physical facilities from which they either run business operations, and/or warehousing for mass physical product storage and distribution.

An example would be the movie-rental shop Blockbuster Video, which has physical stores and is in competition with the newer online rental services offered by Netflix. In this sense, the term is also a retronym in that most stores had a physical presence before the advent of the Internet. However the term is also applicable when contrasting businesses with physical presence and those that operated strictly in an order-by-mail capacity pre-Internet.

See also

• Bricks and clicks