Welcome to the second installment of our e-business/e-commerce column. Last month I addressed some basic questions to get you thinking critically: “Does it make good business sense for my shop to have an e-commerce operation?”
This month I’m going to address another major block in our foundation before we begin wrenching the nuts and bolts of the design, development, and operation of your e-commerce site. You need to decide on, and understand, what your target market is going to be for your site.
There’s a huge difference in how you set up and run your operation depending on whom you want to target. Are you going to specialize in sport bike oriented products to the Gen-Y crowd, comfort and ergonomic accessories to the middle-aged touring crowd, or OEM hard-parts and repair items?
Your market focus will drive most of your later decisions about your site’s design and functionality. If your target demographic needs the latest and greatest, your site needs to be easily updated to showcase those new items. You may also require a dedicated person to do the sourcing, merchandising, and marketing for all those new parts.
If you’re going after the OEM repair and replacement market, you’re going to want to think about having some type of communication system on your site like an online chat so customers can ask questions about their repair. You may also want to think about having a tech write frequent columns on various service or repair issues.
To help sell OEM hard-parts, develop an online micro-fiche system so that more mechanically-minded, self-serve visitors can figure out what they need and order it off your site. Be prepared to offer excellent customer service to help people choose the correct parts. You will also want to maintain a liberal return/exchange policy for when they order the wrong part. Go for outstanding knowledge and customer service and people will not mind paying the full price necessary for you to maintain a healthy business.
As you are formulating your online strategy, do everything you can to come up with ways to have your site stand out at the top. It will be much more pleasant experience, and if you do it correctly, it will be more profitable as well!
Look around your physical shop. What are you known for? What unique products do you offer? Do you manufacturer any of your own products or have exclusive distribution rights on products that no one else can offer? Do you have phenomenally knowledgeable sales staff that knows your products inside and out? Is your customer loyalty so high that people drag their friends into your shop on their vacations so that they can have them experience it first hand? Those are the types of things you can build a successful e-commerce operation out of.
In the end, it’s about your knowledge and communication of that knowledge. When it comes to standard parts, you will need to spend a lot of time on merchandising and product information. That means having excellent pictures of your products, outstanding descriptions that go above and beyond what the manufacturer may supply or any of your competitors offer. Have your staff add their own insights into the product’s usage, installation, or maintenance. If you are a shop that is into racing or performance, then pump that up on line. Communicate your tuning knowledge as it applies to racing, performance, etc. We’ll get into it more in later issues, but when it comes to an e-commerce website, content is king. [ed: if possible or proper, please keep bold as this is going to be a major point later on in the column] Yes, there are going to be people that read all your descriptions, instructions, etc. and then go to their local dealer or some other “discount” website. That’s just a fact you need to learn to live with. Fortunately the opposite happens enough that you’ll still make enough money for the effort to be totally worthwhile and rewarding.
In short, would you rather have loyal customers that appreciate the value you provide and rave about it to their friends and on message boards on the internet, or customers that buy from you because you are five cents cheaper than the next site you never see them again? How you answer that question drives just about everything else this column is going to talk about in the future.
Tags:Column, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online
