Selling Online #1: First column for Dealernews

Welcome to the first in a series of articles about how to get your dealership involved in the world of e-business. While most of the series is going to involve e-commerce, there’s also going to be some general advice about other areas of e-business such as using the internet as a marketing tool, and how manufacturers and distributors can leverage the power of the Internet to improve their business as well as help their dealers.

This first article is primarily going to tackle the most important question you should be asking about getting your dealership involved in e-commerce, and it’s not,”How much is this going to cost?”

The question you should be asking is, “Does it make sense for our dealership to even be involved in e-commerce?” There’s no reason to make the investment necessary to sell on-line if that money could be put to better use in your physical shop.

It’s worth pointing out that regardless of your decision regarding e-commerce, you absolutely must have a website for marketing and communication purposes. Not having a website makes a strong, and usually negative, statement about your shop. Remember however that a bad website is still worse than no website at all. Unless he’s an amazing whiz-kid, your neighbor’s 13 year old is probably not the right person to do it for you. I’ll go into more detail about site design and development in future columns, but keep in mind that there’s no reason you can’t get a very basic, professionally designed and developed static website for between $1,000 and $2,000.

When deciding to sell on-line, the first thing you really need to do is perform a truthful appraisal of the value that your shop can add to the internet. As you’re aware, the internet is already full of places for people to buy their motorcycle and powersports parts and accessories on-line. What’s your target market going to be and how can you provide value to them that they have a hard time getting elsewhere? What’s your Exclusive Advantage? Without a limitless supply of capital, you’re going to need to start modestly, and to be successful you’re going to need a niche. If you think you can start up offering everything to everyone at the lowest price, you’re most likely going to fail. The next article will go into more detail about how to determine who your target market should be and how to set up your operation with them in mind.

The second question you need to ask is, “Can my dealership actually support this new business?” If you’re in the position where your shop’s operations are inefficient and chaotic, your inventory is inaccurate, and you don’t have enough employees to help customers that are walking in your door, you should get those things addressed first. Weakness in those operational areas (I’ll cover more e-commerce related operational issues in future articles) are going to be magnified once the orders start rolling in, resulting in irate customers shouting to the world in on-line forums about their poor experience with your shop. Remember that getting involved in e-commerce gives you the opportunity to screw up your shop’s reputation up on a global scale!

Closing out this first column, I feel I should address the question that is typically (and incorrectly) asked first. “What’s this going to cost me?” The truth is that it depends. It depends on the scale of the operation you want to create. On one end of the extreme would be the simple five page marketing website with links to your eBay auctions for a few parts you want to sell. As stated earlier this could be modestly set up for no more than $1,000 to $2,000, however the returns would most likely be equally modest. The other end of the extreme would be a professional e-commerce package developed by a top-notch design firm that could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Future articles will help you understand where your dealership should be in that range and how to make the best use of your resources once you make the decision to leap into the world of e-business.

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