Selling Online #42 : Be Where Your Customers Are

Welcome to 2010! I want to kick off this year with a column about selling online, but selling someplace else other than your own website. This is something that you can engage in even if you’re not directly engaged in full-blown e-commerce on your dealership’s primary website.

What I’m talking about is taking advantage of things like e-commerce applications on social networking sites like Facebook and other “widgets” that you can embed in blogs or forums.

The first example I’ll point out is a company called Payvment [http://www.payvment.com/] that has a nifty little storefront application for Facebook.

In order for this to work you’ll need to have a Facebook fan page set up for your dealership. You simply install the application on your page, set up the look at feel of the storefront using the tools that Payvement gives you, enter in some information about your shop, and then start loading products. (Obviously there’s more detailed steps involved and Payvment’s site provides all the details).

I’d recommend experimenting at first and a load a small selection (around 10) of products that are impulse buy, gift, general interest type of products. You’ll want to keep in mind that Facebook is not really a shopping destination, and typically you’ll want to focus on the interaction and social networking aspect of Facebook and keep the sales pitches to a minimum. But since it is a fan page, I see it as a great way to sell things like t-shirts, hats, and other items branded with your shop’s logo, or the brands that you carry.

Considering that Payvement is totally free to use right now, there’s really no reason to not give it a try and see if there’s a sensible way for you to fit it into the overall online activities.

One dealership that has begun experimenting with Payvment is Ducati Seattle [http://tinyurl.com/ykppl42]. What’s interesting about the fact that they have this e-commerce application running on Facebook is that they don’t even have any e-commerce on their primary dealership website!

Ducati Seattle’s Cindy Wallace is in charge of the Facebook storefront as well as their eBay store where they focus on selling crash damage take-offs, excess & obsolete, etc. Cindy told me that based on a combination of factors (strong local community support & involvement in the shop, etc.) Ducati Seattle has made the decision to not have a full-blown e-commerce operation. “People prefer to come into the shop to buy things where they can actually see them and to see other people there as well.”

But that doesn’t mean that they are not active online in other ways. Based on leadership by Ducati Seattle’s owner David Roosevelt they have made a decision to be very involved in social media like Facebook. Considering that they have over 1,200 fans on their Facebook page it makes sense that they are giving the Payvement application a test ride.

Another Facebook application for selling products from within your Facebook page is Nimbit MyStore for Facebook [http://tinyurl.com/yzvdzxh]. Nimbit seems to be going more for the rock band trying to sell merchandise angle (so they offer features like the ability to sell tickets or downloadable music), but I don’t see why you couldn’t use it to sell merchandise for your shop. Nimbit has several offerings that range from free to about twenty bucks a month.

Moving away from Facebook, I want to point out that there’s a growing number of widgets that allow you to place shopping experiences on more content-centered (as opposed to shopping-centered) websites and pages. A widget is a small bit of code that you embed in a webpage that provides a little area or box where something shows up that gives people information (weather, race results, etc.) or in our case a product display with the ability to buy it right there.

These widgets allow what I call contextual commerce. Where you can offer products that go along with the content the visitor is reading about. Writing a post in your blog about how to bleed the brakes? Why not have a widget in the side bar selling brake fluid, brake bleeders, pads, etc?

There’s quite a few people playing in this widget area out there. Here’s a few leads to get you started: BlinkCart [http://www.blinkcart.com/], Shopit [http://www.shopit.com/], CartFly [http://www.cartfly.com/], and Amazon [https://widgets.amazon.com/] even has widgets that let you sell products they offer (or that you have loaded as an Amazon merchant) on your site.

Check out Widgetbox (a clearinghouse of all things widget) as well and check out the ecommerce tag http://www.widgetbox.com/tag/ecommerce. Finally, of course, you can always Google “e-commerce widgets” to track down more of the latest and greatest as developers keep the wheels of progress humming along.

Having a storefront on Facebook or an e-commmerce widget on your blog is most likely not going to be a silver bullet in terms of generating a huge amount of extra revenue. A lot of this has to do with the fact that most people out there are not in the shopping mood when they are on a social site like Facebook. However, having a good selection of impulse purchase products and gifty items makes a lot of sense. It gives you a chance to have a few more hooks in the water in terms of selling things and it keeps you abreast of what’s going on in the world of e-commerce technology and off-site merchandising.

If you give this a try, please let me know how it works for you!

Tags:Column, contextual commerce, DealerNews, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking