Archive for the 'Merchandising' tag

What is DustyMoto? A particularly harsh desert race in Arizona? A porn star from the 70’s with a predilection for motorcycle apparel? Actually, DustyMoto is one of the most innovative companies that I’ve come across in our industry and one that you should absolutely be signed up for and using.

DustyMoto is a web-based service that creates a virtual warehouse in “the cloud” that is composed of all the inventory with nine months of no sales held at its participating dealers. When a dealer has demand for a part they don’t have, rather than order it from the OEM, they order it through DustyMoto, and the part is shipped from one of the dealers in the network that has it as excess or obsolete inventory.

Let me rewind and explain what all that means.  First, a virtual warehouse in the “cloud” means that all of the product that DustyMoto shows as available in their system is not sitting in a big physical warehouse somewhere (if it was, it would be pretty big as DustyMoto’s CEO Bobby Franklin told me that they currently have around $45 million in inventory). All of the inventory is being held at participating dealers around the country. “The Cloud” is the term that has been developed in the internet application space to refer to data storage and processing capability that is not housed on any one machine. It’s physically spread all over the place but the application or database appears as one unified entity (Google’s App Engine or Amazon’s S3 for example).

The inventory in the system is typically all stuff that is at least 9months old. According to DustyMoto, studies show that if a part is on your shelf with no sales activity for 9 months, odds are really, really good that it’s going to be there for a birthday or two before you finally pitch it or it ends up on eBay for pennies on the dollar. DustyMoto makes it’s money off a small commission/fee to the seller, currently 15%. Considering that most shops eventually blow out old inventory at levels much steeper than 15%, and typically after incurring carrying costs that add up to way more than that over a year or two, 15% seems reasonable.

Another nice aspect for the seller is that all parts are sold at current dealer cost (the same cost in your price files). That means that it’s possible that you may have paid $100 for a part a year ago, but the part now sells from the OEM for $125, so DustyMoto transacts it for $125. You just made (or recouped carrying costs) $25 on that part.

This is the type of brilliant idea that I’ve called for in several columns over the years. Although in my naivete I thought that it would have been driven by the distributors or OEM’s. Bobby from DustyMoto sent my thinking straight on that one. He explained that the OEM’s and Disti’s have zero interest in making the supply chain or inventory management efficient across the industry. In fact, it’s in their best interest to stuff inventory into the channel with the ferocity of a farmer cramming feed into a goose for foi gras.

When I pointed out that inventory carrying costs were one of the largest contributors to dealers having financial hard-times, and wouldn’t it be in the OEM’s interest to do what they can to make their dealers more healthy. I could sense Bobby rolling his eyes over the phone as he explained to me that if that dealer dies off, it’s an opportunity for the OEM to shove inventory into another empty parts department in the dealership that steps in to take the dead one’s place. My, what a healthy industry we have…

With those market dynamics in place, it’s imperative that dealers and retailers in our industry use all the tools available to make ourselves as self-sufficient and profitable as possible. Think of DustyMoto as a Co-Op that allows all of the dealers in the country to work together to make the entire industry more efficient, effective, and healthy.

Think about it… How much old inventory do you have on your shelves that you just know someone, somewhere, is ordering brand new from the OEM…? How many times do you order a part for an older bike that you just know has been sitting on some poor sucker’s shelf two states over for the last three years? DustyMoto is in place to solve these very real problems

I’d like to see DustyMoto’s capability built into every major DMS system out there. When you add a part to an invoice that is not in stock at your shop, it should query DustyMoto’s servers first, before that special order goes to the OEM or distributor. It should be seemless. If DustyMoto has not already begun working on an integration with folks like Ziios (see Arlo’s recent article on Ziios openness to integration and extension) they are missing the boat. If DustyMoto and Ziios offer that capability, then ADP better get on board as well.

I honestly believe that if DustyMoto plays it’s cards right, they have the ability to radically transform a major aspect of our business thus making everyone at the retail level a lot better off. And like all networks, the more nodes, or participants, the better it will all work.

I think one of the biggest risks to their success is if one of the major DMS players steps in and sets up a competing network (which is not just bad for DustyMoto, but bad for the idea as a whole because now you have inventory split into multiple exclusive networks).

I also think that DustyMoto needs to implement a type of credit system that rewards buying from the network. Sure, everyone wants to unload their old stuff, but I think there needs to be an incentive system that can help re-train the behaviors of parts managers to not just order from the OEM or distributor first without checking DustyMoto’s system (again, integration into the DMS will help alleviate this). Maybe a system that the more you buy from the network, the lower commission rate you have to pay when you need to unload your own old stuff?

After a year that had me writing a few columns and blog posts that made me sad or mad about things going on in this industry, I’m happy to be able to finish up my year with a column that is as hopeful for what may be ahead for our industry as this one.

Now go sign up!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, marketing, Merchandising, supply-chain

This month I’m going to dive into a topic that I believe will be one of the most important factors contributing to the long-term viability of the business model that drives our industry. That topic is the retail supply chain in our industry. Specifically the issue of suppliers that sell direct to your customers.

Long before I got into the e-commerce and internet marketing racket or got professionally involved in the powersports industry I received my college degree in what’s now called (but wasn’t yet widely known as) supply chain management. Combining that education with a lifetime of being a computer geek, and being smack dab in the middle of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley in the middle and late 90′s has provided me with a rather unique perspective with regards to how the internet and related technologies relate to doing business on the web.

Some of my first thoughts when e-commerce burst on the scene back in the dark ages of the web was that the internet was obviously going to have a tremendous disintermediation effect on pretty much every facet of the traditional supply chain. In a nutshell, disintermediation is the process of removing “links” in the supply chain.

Low and behold through a series of twists and turns in my schizophrenic career path I end up with the amazing opportunity to watch, comment on, and participate in the very phenomenon! Not only do I have this opportunity, I have it in an industry that has been so benighted, backwards, and generally late to the party when it comes to modern technology, modern business practices, and attitudes that it’s getting hit harder and faster than a lot of other industries ever were.

For background I direct you to an October 2009 post on  Dealernews’ blog by editor Arlo Redwine  entitled “Vendors That Compete Against Their Own Dealers“.

That post generated (relative to the majority of posts on the DN blog site) a large number of comments. I strongly suggest you go and read that post and the comments. While you’re there, take some time an offer your point of view on the subject. Our industry needs more dialog on these issues.

Arlo again touched on this issue in June with his excellent job of moving this along by offering an  introduction to Shopatron, a company that allows OEM’s to sell direct, but have the actual fulfillment handled by dealers that participate in the Shopatron program.
All of this has done an excellent job of laying out who some of the players are and the techniques they are using to transform the retail supply chain for (currently only) PG&A.
I want to spend a little time looking at why the OEM’s are doing what they are doing, what you need to be thinking about and more importantly how you can prepare for how all of this is going to shape our industry in the future.
First, one has to ask: “why the manufacturers are doing this in the first place?” Why would a manufacturer that has had a retail supply chain in place decide to radically alter that by selling direct to the consumer? Based on conversations I’ve had, things that I’ve read, and my own analysis, I think it comes down to the OEM’s not believing in either the long-term vitality or maybe even the long-term survival of the powersports industry’s retail supply chain.

Put simply OEM’s don’t feel that the traditional dealers are adequately meeting the market demand for their products. That can be in terms of gross numbers, product mix, whatever. The bottom line is that for OEM’s to make this move it’s a signal that they don’t trust the established retail channel to move enough product. An OEM that’s selling direct is saying to you, “you’re not getting the job done, so we’re going to work on cutting you out.”
Quite a few of the OEM’s that want to sell direct are currently willing to use services like Shopatron (or 50 Below’s “Referral E-Commerce” affiliate program for distributors), but I think they are only doing it for two reasons: self-serving interests and political cover.

The self-serving interests has to do with Shopatron’s stated policy that fulfilling dealers must have the product in stock in order to “bid.” This has the effect of forcing inventory deeper into the supply chain, pushing it down to the retailers that want to participate. This helps the OEM’s books by allowing them to recognize the revenue and get that inventory off their books freeing cash and increasing profits. Of course this also pushes the excess and obsolete risk to the dealer/retailer, eats up their cash, and violates pretty much every tenet of progressive, modern supply chain management principals. The deeper in the supply chain a product is carried the lower its utility and the higher its cost.

Paradoxically, the more “successful” Shopatron and the OEM are in getting dealers signed up, the more competition there is for each of these orders. As the deciding factor for who gets the order from the Shopatron system is based on the combination of having the item in stock and the physical proximity of the dealer to the customer we end up with more dealers/retailers carrying more and more inventory hoping to collect more and more of the crumbs that fall from the OEM’s table.

This is great news for the OEM’s (except for those that have generous inventory rotation or send-back policies. If there’s an OEM that has a no-questions asked, unlimited return policy that is also participating in Shopatron, I would argue that they need to fire whomever is running their channel strategy). The OEM’s now have an enticing carrot to get retailers to carry more of their inventory which is something that they have always seemingly wanted more than anything, even if in this time of relatively cheap expedited logistics it’s a stupid thing to do.

Of course if the retailers/dealers balk at taking a bite at the carrot and don’t sign up for Shopatron or don’t increase their stocking levels, the OEM will make the sale anyway (most of the time at full retail!).
The OEM’s can always defend their decision to sell direct by saying, “hey, we offered the olive branch of giving you the opportunity to participate in Shopatron and make this sale. Don’t be mad at us!”

Shopatron is win-win for the manufacturer. There is no downside for them, but there’s plenty of potential downside for the dealers. I’ve already brought up the issue of inventory liability. But what about direct competition?
Take for example a prominent vehicle OEM (we’ll call them BRANDX) which sells direct from its own Shopatron powered site shop.BRANDX.com.

Let’s say that I’m a dealer that has spent considerable time and energy building an e-commerce operation selling their stuff. That includes significant investment in things like SEO to make sure my site shows up high in the search results.

I’ve managed to get ranked in the top 5 for several BRANDX related keywords. Keep in mind that several studies have shown that as you move down the search engine results pages (SERPS) the chance of getting someone to click on you drop dramatically.

Now BRANDX comes along with a naturally highly ranked domain name (BRANDX.com) that is running its store at a subdomain (store.BRANDX.com). All of a sudden  my previous #5 rank in Google is #6 because BRANDX’s own site is ranked #5. Using some of my SEO tools that check search engine position, that has indeed happened. This is not a hypothetical. There are retailers/dealers that are indeed losing real online sales to their own OEM and by extension to a competing dealer that is participating in Shopatron or to the OEM themselves if it’s for a product that no one bids on in Shopatron.

Of course the situation is even more heinous if the manufacturer that’s selling direct is not using Shopatron or any other method to pass the sale on to its dealer/retail channel. If you are competing directly with a manufacturer for retail sales, you need to really question why you are doing business with them and selling their products. There may be some legitimate reasons to do so, but in our industry the way it is today, those reasons are few and far between.

Why have we gotten to this point? I believe that it comes down to the systematic failure of our industry to adequately develop a supply chain that meets the needs of the modern marketplace. That, combined with the fact that OEM’s, distributors’, and retailers’ motivations and incentives are often at best incompatible, if not downright counter-purpose. Mix in thousands and thousands of retailers/dealers that are all selling virtually undifferentiated products that are relatively low margin, high cost, and high-cube and you’ve got the situation we’re in now.

So what do we do about it? Well, the first thing you need to do is get signed up for Shopatron. That’s a 100% complete no-brainer. As long as it’s there, you need to sign up for it and monitor it for any orders that you can fulfill. Keep in mind that these are already lost sales. Only by being in Shopatron can you attempt to recapture them. Unless you have a strategic interest to really jump into Shopatron, I would not recommend increasing your inventory stocking levels until you get a feel for what the market is like for the brands and products. Just use Shopatron like a line in the water initially.

To conclude, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything overtly nefarious about Shopatron, or OEM’s trying to fulfill what they see as un-served or under-served demand in the market. OEM’s that I’ve talked to say that they have basically been pushed into this position as they have customers contacting them directly wanting to buy because they can’t find what they want in the retail channel. I just think that the current solution is at best a band-aid that still tips the playing field too far in the OEM’s and large retailer’s favor at the detriment of the rest of the dealers.

Ultimatly one of two things will happen: Better information systems and processes will be developed that allow real-time sharing of supply and demand information up and down and across the powersports supply chains to insure more efficent operations… Or… There will be less and less opportunity for the smaller dealerships and retailers that make up the current landscape.

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, Merchandising, powersports, Powersports Industry, Search Engine Optimization, supply-chain

Imagine this scenario: You’ve survived the Great Recession. However to make it through the epic national blood-letting you had to dramatically reduce your shop’s staff. However, now that riding season is here you’ve got customers coming into your shop looking to buy gear or get information on vehicles. Unfortunatly, you don’t have the staff level required to give personal attention to everyone. What can you do to help mitigate this issue until you can get staffed up again?

Well, do you have a website? One of those fancy e-commerce enabled ones that you’ve never really been able to do a whole lot with or see a dramatic ROI?

Here’s this month’s mind-bending idea… Turn your web presence inside out! Set up a few obvious, friendly, comfortable locations in your dealership where customers can access your website and get information about vehicles, parts and gear.

The formal name for these would be Internet Kiosks. They are a great way to leverage a powerful asset that you are most likely not using to it’s full potential right now. It allows customers to do a certain amount of self-directed research or shopping in a similar way that they do now with a brochure (but you never run out) or with those stacks of parts catalogs (without all the counter clutter).

Kiosks are not just a band-aid for a lack of staff. They have proven to be worthwhile enough that major retailers like REI, Staples, and Best Buy have made them part of their stores. In addition to just having customers use the kiosks on their own, they are useful as a tool to have your parts or sales staff use with the customer.

By seeing how effective your site can be in a real-world scenario maybe you can justify spending the time and money to make your website even better. Merchandise your site and create useful product groupings to help customers in your shop and you’ll automatically have a website that will perform better out in its natural habitat of the internet.

So how would you pull this off? Well, there are companies that can provide you with ready-made internet kiosks (Google “internet kiosk manufacturer”) so you can just plug-and-play. If you have access to someone with adequate technical capability you could also whip these up yourself.

Browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome all have the ability to be run in a Kiosk mode. Kiosk mode basically locks down the browser so that the user is very limited in what they can do. There’s no ability to access the OS, run other programs and so on.

A basic PC from Dell or HP that would be suitable can be had for a few hundred bucks. You can even go for one of those new touch-screen based all-in-one models. A fairly stylish computer stand from Ikea will set you back like another hundred bucks.

You could even pull off this idea with one of Apple’s new iPads. Regardless of the computing device you choose you’ll of course want to make sure the entire thing is secured to avoid having it walk out of your dealership.

And speaking of security, you’ll want to either install filtering software on the PC or control access at your store’s network router to limit the sites that the kiosks can access. You don’t want customers surfing porn or, worse yet, visiting competing dealer’s or retailer’s sites!

Finally you’ll want to communicate to your staff what’s up with the kiosks. Make it clear that you don’t see the kiosks as a way to replace the humans in shop. Educate your staff that the kiosks are a tool that they can use to actually improve customer interaction when they have the bandwidth or as a way to allow customers to do a little “self help” when things are crazy. It’s better than having customers wander aimlessly around your shop twiddling their fingers waiting for someone to help them.

Don’t let the lack of staff be the only reason you try out the kiosk idea. Many top retailers have found that having shopping kiosks are a great way to flesh out a full multi-channel retail strategy. Maybe you’ll discover you’ve been sitting on a secret gold mine all this time. You just needed to look at it differently!

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, Merchandising, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online

The idea for this month’s column came to me last year when I was out doing some Christmas shopping. I didn’t have a specific item in mind, but I did have a general idea. Now this is a store that I don’t normally do a lot of shopping in so I’m sure when I walked through the door I had a little of that “deer in the headlights” look. Fortunately this store was staffed with knowledgeable and helpful staff and I think even more importantly, the products were organized and presented in a manner that made it, if not enjoyable, at least pleasant to shop in.

One thing that’s pretty obvious from looking through those stacks of catalogs on your parts counter is that we are in an industry with an insane number of products that our customers can choose from. While a small percentage of the hard-core enthusiasts know exactly what they want (you know the type.. The ones that have the distributor catalog memorized and come in with reams of printouts from the forums) most people need some help figuring out what they need or even more importantly what they don’t know they need.

Unlike in your physical store where you can have one of your knowledgeable and helpful staff aid a lost customer, on your website for the most part, the customer is on their own (unless of course you’ve got some type of online chat and co-browsing or co-shopping application on your site).

When it comes to e-commerce, the only tool you really have to help the customer is the merchandising on your website. For the purpose of this column I’m going to define merchandising to encompass three things:

1. Organization of the products (product or feature groups, category and taxonomy development, etc.)
2. Selection of products (what product go into those groupings or receive some other type of “feature” status)
3. Presentation of the products

The first two elements go hand in hand. You can create a “category” on your site and call it something like “Maintenance Essentials” with products that pretty much anyone that rides any type of powersports vehicle is going to find useful or necessary. One of those items may be chain lube. Let’s say you’ve got access to like 10 different brands each with 3 variations and 3 different sizes. That’s 90 different combinations! For one simple product!

Imagine this type of scenario that I think makes up 80% of the shopping situations out there: A guy rides his motorcycle as an alternate commute vehicle and an occasionally for recreation. He likes his motorcycle, but he’s got a life. He doesn’t spend every waking moment on forums to determine what the ultimate chain lube is. He doesn’t ride with a big group of people that will sit around debating the relative benefits of various type of chain lube. All he knows is that his chain looks dirty and needs cleaning and lubing.

He goes to your site, or any typical site, and types in chain lube and is presented with almost 100 choices! For a simple product like chain lube! You need to make sure that on your site that you’ve picked the “best” one or two options for these major product types and present them in a way that makes it 1) easy to find and 2) communicate that based on your expert opinion that these are the ones to go with. Basically the exact same thing that a good parts person would do in a face-to-face situation. The difference is that online you need to do all of this before the customer ever comes onto your site.

There are a few different ways that you can do this. The first is the idea of creating multiple personas of model customers and so scenario planning on how they may interact with your site. Create like 3 to 5 customer types (the hard-core enthusiast, the casual rider, the spouse or parent of a rider, the total noob, etc.) and then imagine a few different scenarios for each type (a major part broke and they need to find a replacement right now, they are new to riding and need everything but don’t know anything, they need to buy a birthday gift for their wife, son, friend that rides, and so on). Pretend to be these various types in various situations and try to organize your site so that there are obvious categories and product assortments that make each customer’s shopping experience as fulfilling as possible.

If your site has been live for a few years and you’ve been using a good analytics package, you can use its data to see how people use your site and utilize real-world data in your scenario planning. Where they go, what they buy, what they look at and don’t buy, etc. etc.

Obviously this is all a lot of work. It’s so much easier to just buy a site from a 3rd party vendor with all the catalogs pre-loaded, or build your own and dump a product feed into it, have a few general categories like helmets, exhausts, etc., and be done with it. That’s what 99% of the sites out there do, and that’s why 99% of the sites out there suck and don’t sell anything! Not only does merchandising make it easier to shop, it’s just about the strongest tool you have to differentiate your site from all the other sites out there!

That doesn’t mean that you should do away with the potentially millions of other products in your online catalogs. More often than not, you’ll want to present that potentially overwhelming selection on a second layer behind the your primary merchandising and allow customers to drill down to explore. Always have a “See all of our chain lube products” link next to your hand-picked selection. Of course a robust and powerful search tool is your best bet to handle these kinds of shoppers.

So now that we’ve dealt with the product selection and organization ideas, let’s move onto the final piece, the presentation of those products.

There are so many cool technologies these days that can help you communicate the features, advantages, and benefits of the products that you sell. You’ve of course got the good ol’ custom written and compelling product description. You’ve got the ability to take your own product photos that show things like the product in use, various angles or views, mounting options and so on. You’ve got videos that you can post on YouTube and embed in the product page. You can post sound files of exhaust systems. The limit is really only your imagination and the amount of time you want to devote to it.

At the very top you can even go big time and use rich-media technology like Adobe’s Scene7 (www.scene7.com) that can provide a huge range of presentation and interaction opportunities.

Try to remember that you are the expert in what you sell. Use that expertise to help customers figure out what they should be buying and communicate it through professional merchandising on your site.

Tags:Column, copywriting, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online

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, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online, social marketing, social media, social-networking

“Well the frost is on the pumpkin, And the hay is in the barn…” those lines from James Taylor’s “Walking Man” always remind me of this time of the year. It’s harvest time, and it’s time for the gardener/farmer to go out and start picking the crops they’ve been growing all season.

If you’re going to play in the internet you need to understand the importance of having a full time “gardener” for your online garden. Someone to nurture it, coax it along, do all of the right things at the right times. Otherwise you’ll end up with what I see a lot of out there: a land of promise transformed into a barren and forsaken land whose bleakness is only interrupted by patches of weeds, brambles, and thorns.

This month’s column compliments perfectly last month’s screed on the importance of hiring the right people. I was up in the air as to which one to present first, but once I seized on the garden/farming metaphor, I figured this one made more sense to run in October.

Last month’s column was all about why and how to hire the best people possible, this month’s column is about what you need them to do and why it needs to be a full-time position.

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, employment, internet, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online

Last month I wrote about the importance of investing the time and energy to write your own product descriptions. Well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words so this month’s column is going to focus on visual merchandising or product photography.

One of the first things that I want to get out of the way is that I am in no way suggesting professional, high-quality product photography is easy or that anyone can do it. Some of the highest paid, working professional photographers are in fact product photographers. They don’t get that way because taking product pictures is easy. It’s a unique discipline with its own dedicated career path.

However, I’m not writing about taking pictures for advertising or high-quality, glossy brochures. I’m going to be describing taking pictures mostly for their pragmatic, informational value. The ability of a picture to display or describe a product in ways that would be impossible or too difficult and time consuming to do with words alone.

Why is it important that you invest in the tools, processes, and expertise necessary to take your own images, especially if you are selling products that have good imagery from the OEM or supplier (which unfortunately is an amazingly rare occurrence)?

Because your website is trying to actually sell the product. You are (hopefully) the last hurdle between your site visitor’s desire to own the product he’s looking at and actually spending the money to buy it.

If the visitor is really close to buying from you, but really needs to see how the bottom, or back of that widget looks, there’s a very high risk that they are going to go to another site or to a brick and mortar store to find out. If you have the photography or other visual merchandising (video, 360 spin views, etc.) to meet their informational need, you’ve just made the sale.

While the informational aspect of the visual merchandising is a primary concern, it should not be your only concern.  You should also want your photography to positively reflect a strong brand image for your dealership and the product that your selling. Try to make the images look as good as you possibly can. Blurry, over-exposed pictures taken on a beat-up, oil-spotted plywood table may not be what your customers are looking to see (however, sharp, well-lit pictures of cool products taken on a beat-up, oil-stained plywood table might be kind of cool!).

Driven by the requirements of huge numbers of eBay-type business the necessary equipment to take semi-professional product photography has gotten very affordable. There are literally thousands of sites out there (just Google “product photography”) that will teach you everything you need to know to get started. And if you don’t want to do it yourself, and don’t currently have someone on staff that can tackle it, craigslist or your local college is a great place to find people with the basic skills that are looking to build portfolios and have a vested interest in making your pictures looks good.

With all of those elements in place, there’s very little in the way of a rational excuse to not take this on if you are serious about setting yourself apart in the e-commerce market place. If you are not the place to go, that means someone else is.

Now to do the job right you’re going to need some basic lighting equipment, a good digital camera, an environment for your products, and the software necessary to make the images look good or to reformat them for your website.

You can get some really decent lighting systems (either constant light or strobe based) on eBay for very little money. Or you can go upscale and shop at places like B&H (http://www.bhphotovideo.com). Or you can even build your own. I know that professional photographers out there are going to want to burn me at the stake for saying this, but there’s really no reason to spend the big bucks for professional lighting gear for our purposes. You don’t need the fancy $40 bulbs and the $300 tripod and fixture. A $3.00 full spectrum compact fluorescent bulb in a $6.00 clip on fixture attached to a 2×4 wood stand works just fine.

However, there are some rules of thumb you need to follow. You want to make sure that ALL of your light bulbs are the same brand and the same type. you can vary the wattage/output, but you get into real problems with color issues if you use different types of bulbs. As long as all the bulbs are the same you can set a custom white-balance point in your camera or do color corrections in your photo software.

Next, you’re going to want to invest in a GOOD digital camera. That’s not really a problem anymore as you can get amazing digital SLR’s with great lenses in a kit for around $500 and non-SLR’s that have astounding built in lenses for around $350. I suggest www.dpreview.com to learn more about what camera to buy. I recommend getting a camera/lens that is as “fast” as you can get (i.e. an f value as close to 2.0 as you can get and when looking at a zoom lens that stays near 2 across the entire zoom range). This will allow you to shoot with faster shutter speeds without needing super bright lights and gives you the ability to use depth of field (DOF) to your advantage.

You’re also going to need an environment to place your products in. This could be a large light-box or light-tent you get off eBay or build yourself or something more creative like a table-top display. You may want to even consider something like a small studio where a beautiful model can display that carbon fiber fender a la QVC. Be creative!

Finally you’re going to need software to edit the images. This can be as simple as cropping and resizing to doing color correction or adding text. The big dog here is Photoshop. There’s nothing you can possibly ever need to do that Photoshop can’t handle either by itself of extended via plug-ins.

However Photoshop has an almost vertical learning curve and if the folks doing the work are not already well versed you may want to look at some software that is more purpose-based for product photography.

A package that is getting some attention is a program called “Bling It” (http://www.blingit.us/) that has some really simple abilities to spruce up the product shots. They have a free download so you should at least try it out. It allows you to place the product on different backgrounds and even do basic retouching of the product to remove scratches, fingerprints, etc.

Finally, if you are really going to take this on, you’re going to want to look at something that automates the workflow and produces consistent results. You might want to look at some of the products offered by Ortery (http://ortery.com). They are a little pricey, but if you have several thousand products to take pictures of, and want to do things like 360 spins and multi angles, these setups will let you do it all and save a lot of time.

Ultimately all of the investment you are going to make in visual merchandising is going to be paid back by higher conversion rates and therefore more revenue. Think about it… Would you settle for dust and cobweb-covered products displayed behind dirty and smudged glass in your showroom? Then why are settling for over-compressed, grainy, small, and generally poor looking product photography on your website?

If you are on one of the turn-key systems, you are currently stuck as none of them allow you to change or add to the product images that come out of the box. If you find yourself in that situation, pick up the phone and call them to request that they change their software to allow you, the merchant, to take more control over how products are displayed on your site. That includes being able to change or add to the descriptions and the product photography. Maybe if they hear from more of you they will make these capabilities more of a priority.

That concludes this two-part series on merchandising. Hopefully by following my advise last month on the words, and this month on the pictures you’ll start raking in even more money. Of course if you don’t do it, I’m sure someone else will.

Tags:E-Commerce, internet, Merchandising, Powersports Industry, selling-online

Your website should be like your ultimate sales person. All knowing, all helpful, all the time.

As more and more dealerships and retailers are jumping into the motorcycle and powersports e-commerce space it’s going to become more and more important that you do some key things that differentiate your web store from everyone else.

One area that has a huge bang for the buck is having your own powerful, compelling, and well written product descriptions.

If you really want to set yourself apart from the competition, you need to do things differently especially when it comes to the product descriptions on your site. You shouldn’t be relying on the descriptions that come from the OEM or a distributor catalog. While they might be a good place to start, in general they are just not up to the level you need to truly be a best in class operation.

There are several advantages to doing this:

• Obviously better descriptions that are written to really inform the customer and turn that browser into a buyer will increase conversions and sales. Benefit: More money
• A side benefit is that better descriptions should lead to better search engine rankings. Even if they don’t get you to number one or number two (or even three or four) if everyone else is using the same canned descriptions, your unique description when picked up by the search engine and used as that little summary below your link (when well written as a sales tool) will lead more people to click your link even if you are nut at the very top (of course you still need to be at least in the top 10). Benefit: More traffic
• A last benefit I’ll spell out here is that you will slowly become known as the place on the web to go for in-depth information on motorcycle and powersports products. Sure you might be shouting at me (or at least my goofy picture above the column), “So I put all that time and energy into writing great descriptions, millions of people visit my site, then they go to some web discounter to get them for less!” Well yes, that may happen, but the increase in reputation, traffic, and so on will undoubtedly lead to more sales in the long run. Benefit: Better reputation and brand image

And of course unlike having to educate and train parts people over and over as they leave your shop and new one come in, once you put it on the website, it’s done!

Where does this in-depth product knowledge come from? Well, it should be coming from your parts department. If the people in your parts department don’t do much more than hold down the counter with their elbows waiting for a customer to come in or call, and when they do all they do is read the customer the description out of the product brochure or distributor’s catalog, they are not really providing a very unique service.

If you don’t have a parts staff that could, at any moment, give a customer a more compelling reason to buy some widget or doodad than that customer could get from reading a brochure, the manufacturer’s website (in most cases), or a distributor’s catalog, you need a new parts staff. Or at the very least you need to begin a comprehensive product training program so that your parts staff can provide the level of service that will blow customers away and that you can use on your website.

After all, some one’s dealership has to be known as the best place in the world to get the highest level of motorcycle and powersports information. Why shouldn’t it be yours? Are you afraid you’ll make so much money that you won’t know what to do with it all?

With your website acting as a never sleeping extension of that parts sales team, you should be doing everything you can to get the knowledge that’s in their heads onto your web customer’s computer screen when they visit your site.

Now obviously not everyone has the ability or education level to be able to write to the level that public display on a professional website requires and that’s where having your own professional merchandising copywriter comes in.

Hire a person that can write really, really well and have meetings between that person and your parts staff to go over all the products that you’re selling. Have your knowledgeable parts staff go over all the features, advantages, and benefits of the products and then let your merchandising copy-writer put them into words that sell. It is it’s own unique art form to write in a manner that sells products. Don’t assume that just because you have a warehouse full of monkeys banging away on keyboards that they have the ability to write truly amazing web copy that sells.

If you’re doing decent business, or want to be doing decent business, I’d recommend hiring someone internally. If you don’t want to go that way, there’s plenty of writers that are looking to make some money while they are waiting for their Great American Novel to get published. Look for someone with a background in catalog (remember mail-order) copy-writing that is also a motorcycle or powersports enthusiast and hire them on a contract basis.

Now if you are on a turn-key platform you may not have the ability to re-write the product descriptions for products that come out of their “catalogs.” Obviously this puts you at a potentially huge competitive disadvantage against the dealerships and other retailers that have taken my advice and not relied on these canned solutions.

It’s time to make a decision. If your website does not allow you to have the level of control that you need to be successful, then it seems like it might be a good idea to start developing a plan to get onto your own platform and take control of your future.

Next month I’ll expand on the product merchandising vein by talking about why it’s important to invest in your own product photography.

Tags:Column, copywriting, E-Commerce, ecommerce, Merchandising, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, SEO