E Commerce
Retailing Synergy Through Multiple Sales
Channels: Two Success Stories
Successful
online retailing can provide insight into offline sales as
well.
Online sales are growing for small
businesses. But that doesn't mean they should ignore their
offline efforts. Indeed, by using metrics provided from online
sites, retailers can improve their both sales and customer
service at their brick-and-mortar sites.
“At the end of the day, the bottom line
profit from e-commerce isn't just from revenue generation,”
says Edward P. Foy, Jr., chief executive office of
eFashionSolutions, a company manages e-commerce sites for
specialty retailers like Baby Phat, House of Dereon, and
Orange County Choppers. “Only one percent to six percent of
all sales today are online, but the relevancy of the
information that you can get online can help the profitability
of your online and offline operations alike."
Knowledge is power, and by using the tools
that are available to measure online success can remove the
guesswork for all aspects of running a business. Data can help
you increase operational efficiencies and profit with targeted
media buying, more efficient distribution, and insight that
helps bring the right products and services to market.
"That information provides you with an edge
in the marketplace,” says Foy.
From experience, eFashionSolutions, which
helps fashion designers with Web site design and management,
has found that online surveys help determine if a retailer is
spending adverting dollars in the right place. The information
garnered from online surveys, e-commerce sales, and returns
data can help a retailer determine the items customers want as
well as where customers are geographically, the latter can
help with proper merchandising at physical locations.
In managing the online site for JLO by
Jennifer Lopez, eFashionSolutions at first attempted a
multimillion-dollar media blitz, but an online survey later
showed that the media used weren't effectively reaching the
targeted customers. E-mail blasts have been much less costly
and much more effective, according to Foy.
“Today's customer is smart and connected,”
Foy says. “They have higher expectations for what they expect
from [retailers]. Guesswork is in the past. By bringing data
to the forefront, we can learn what the customer expects from
us today and in the future.”
By digging deep into data, companies can
locate and fix problems, Foy says, pointing to an example of a
retailer with an unacceptable return rate. However, deeper
examination of the issue found that 90 percent of the returns
were coming on items from a single factory.
“You only have one shot to make a first
impression,” Foy says.
Multiple Online Channels
While most think of “different channels” as
brick-and-mortar, telephone sales, and online purchases,
successful online-only merchants have different e-commerce
channels as well, according to Ty Simpson, owner and operator
of Ty's Toy Box, an online retailer that's grown to a
multimillion-dollar operation in less than three years.
Ty's started selling through eBay, but that
method is becoming more dominated by “big box” retail chains
and is a more expensive option than running one's own site,
says Simpson, who chose to mix a variety of online channels to
reach the market: hosted--which includes eBay, Overstock.com,
Shopzilla, ubid, and Froogle--and its own e-commerce platform.
But for those hosted options to work
alongside a company's own e-commerce site, it's important for
the customer to have the same checkout experience regardless
of which site he initially enters by, Simpson says. EBay (21.8
percent), Yahoo! (17.3 percent) and Google (15.8 percent) are
the top sites visited before a consumer goes to Ty's Toy Box.
So Ty's Toy Box chose an e-commerce platform
from Truition that takes the consumer from any of the hosted
sites directly to a customized Ty's Toy Box home page. There
are a handful of different Ty's Toy Box home pages a user
might come to, all depending on the brand of toy a shopper is
interested in, Simpson says. One thing he has learned:
“Consumers shop by brand,” he says.
Each of these “microsites,” as Simpson calls
them, offers items by brand category, such as Strawberry
Shortcake or Wiggles. At checkout, each has the same look and
feel as the Ty's Toy Box site. And any user logging on to
check order status or get customer service will get the same
look-and-feel regardless of which microsite they enter by.
Citing a Forrester Research study, Simpson
says that product placement and promotion on a company's home
page is the top method (92 percent) for turning browsers into
buyers. Use of measurements and analytics is second (84
percent), while site redesign (82 percent) was third.
“Consumers expect a shopping standard,”
Simpson says, adding that he has learned by analyzing the
various channels that shipping costs are the top reason for
shopping card abandonment. The "sticker shock" of such costs
result in more than half of all transactions that consumers
don't complete.
Ty's also pays for premium listings with
search engines, Simpson says. “Search engine itemization is
critical. We were an early adopter of paid search. And we pay
for performance [actual sales], not just clicks.”
Another critical factor is offering multiple
payment options. So Ty's Toy Box recently added a “bill me
later” feature. It was an option that many of the company's
shoppers requested, Simpson says.
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