Say you’re in the mood for filet mignon tonight. You go online and search for restaurants serving your preferred cut of meat, decide on one, make your reservations, perhaps even select your table, all via the Internet.

This is one vision Michael Kettenring has for naplesmall.com, an online business-to-consumer marketplace specifically for local businesses. Launched in January by Naples-based Netvivo Technology Partners, naplesmall.com brings Main Street to the Internet, says Kettenring, executive vice president of Netvivo.

“What makes naplesmall so special and so unique — because there are a lot of [electronic] malls out there — is that it is e-commerce-ready and supports regional businesses,” says Kettenring. If you want to buy flowers, for example, you might go to a shopping portal, click on flowers, and end up with a flower shop in San Diego, as Kettenring did recently. “I didn’t want to buy flowers from three time zones away,” he says.

That experience affirmed Netvivo’s philosophy of keeping it local for naplesmall.com. “People want to buy from stores in their own community,” says Ginny Goodman, sales manager for Netvivo. “That’s the attraction.”

naplesmall.com attempts to keep business in the area or bring business here by giving Naples merchants a convenient e-commerce solution, says Kettenring. A business can use naplesmall.com’s templates to create its own Web site and sell products online. Just as importantly, naplesmall.com gives the site a home on the Web. Just as in a physical shopping mall, tenants of the electronic mall benefit from all traffic at the mall. This, according to Netvivo, gives small local businesses a fighting chance against brick-and-click giants — for a reasonable cost.

The basic package for a Web site on naplesmall.com is $19.90 per month, with no set-up fee. Adding various e-commerce capabilities, marketing services, and other features can increase that price to $49, $139, or $179 per month, with a one-time set-up fee ranging from $150 to $690. A merchant with an existing Web site can establish a link to naplesmall.com for a one-time fee of $150 and a monthly hosting fee of $49.

European Influence

Though the emphasis at naplesmall.com is local, it has a great deal of European influence. The site is modeled after similar sites in Europe, where the electronic marketplace is very popular, says Goodman. Netvivo’s partners in the venture include German Yellow Pages and Siemens Corporation, which operate some European online malls, explains Goodman. Another partner is FrontStore, a division of German Yellow Pages that developed the e-commerce technology used by naplesmall.com.

Because a lot of Europeans travel to Naples, naplesmall.com has attracted a significant amount of international traffic — in the neighborhood of 30 percent, says Goodman. She expects that percentage to increase now with the summer influx of European travelers. naplesmall.com runs a banner ad on the German Yellow Pages site, which brings some of the international traffic.

Netvivo’s parent company is Contronex, a value-added reseller of computer components, based in Naples for the past 10 years. Its owners are the Swiss-born Beat and Claudia Kramer, and about 95 percent of Contronex’s business is international, says Goodman. Contronex and Netvivo are housed in the same building in Naples and share a staff of eight. A five-person sales crew is based in Switzerland.

Netvivo grew out of Contronex as a consulting arm that helps its clients use the Internet to optimize revenues and streamline processes, explains Kettenring. naplesmall.com was a logical offshoot of Netvivo’s business, he says, providing small businesses with an e-commerce solution.

The Web site is hosted on two servers — one at the Netvivo offices in Naples and one in Germany. It runs on a Windows NT platform, but is fully compatible with Unix.

The emphasis in designing the naplesmall.com site for the Naples market was on making it easy to navigate. In Naples, much of the clientele is older and just getting acclimated to the Internet, notes Goodman. “The last thing you want is to make it hard for them to figure out.”

The businesses on the naplesmall site are organized into 18 categories — such as auto and boat, apparel, hotel and accommodations, gifts, real estate, services, and travel — arranged in a panel of buttons. The customer clicks on a category to find a particular business, then clicks on the name of the business to get to that business’s Web site. The customer can also find out about special community events, get the weather, or participate in a chat room.

Within three months of its launching, naplesmall.com was getting about 10,000 hits per month, reports Goodman. The site is still a work in progress, however, as Netvivo strives to bring merchants into the fold. At three months, most of the categories had fewer than four businesses, and some still had none.

With the site launched, the focus has been on marketing. “You can’t just put a mall up in the desert and expect people to show up,” notes Goodman. “A Web site will only bring business to you if you market it as if it’s another location.”

To attract merchants to participate in naplesmall.com, Netvivo is doing old-fashioned knocking on doors and telephoning, as well as direct mail.

To make customers aware of the site, the company is marketing through search engines, of course, explains Goodman. The hope is that if someone enters the word “Naples,” naplesmall.com will show up somewhere near the top of the results list. Netvivo has also done “a tremendous amount of marketing in other media besides the Internet,” says Goodman. It had a booth at the Nuveen Masters tennis tournament in March and is doing some print advertising.

Netvivo so believes in its idea that it plans to take it around the state. The site is meant to be a showcase for many more similar sites — as many as seven or eight in metropolitan areas around the state of Florida in the next year, says Goodman. Each Florida site will use the same underlying technology, but may look different. The Naples audience tends to be a little older, “which triggered us to a design that is not flashy,” says Kettenring. The design would be different for Orlando or Miami, where the audience might be younger and more metropolitan.

Netvivo would like to partner with a publishing company in each location to provide local content and special events that would change regularly, bringing people back to the site repeatedly. The company is working on lining up those partners now, says Kettenring, but is not yet ready to reveal where the next e-mall might be.

Susan Holly is a freelance writer on Sanibel.