eCommerce: You Want It Easy or Do You Want a Shopping Cart?
Bill Floyd
Meet us in the ElectricSmarts Suite at NAED Tampa (November 13-15, 2017)
Why does everybody assume that just because Amazon has been amazingly successful with the Shopping Cart approach in the consumer market, that this is the only and most effective way to do ecommerce? Thinking it through tells you that the contractor market and the consumer market are like night and day. Yet, wholesalers continue to pour dollars and other resources into replicate a model that is yes, slowly progressing into our industry, but while chasing this strategy, they are doing so at the expense of leaving billions of dollars in low hanging orders on the table.
Think about it. Up to 60% of a distributor's business comes from contractors. Unlike Aunt Millie's holiday shopping, for contractors buying products is just another necessary but tedious task to accomplish. It’s a get-in-and-get-it-done as quickly as possible, with no hassles TASK. Picking hundreds of products to place into a shopping cart is the last thing they want to do. The only button they want to press is the EASY button. Shopping carts for large, complicated contractor jobs are the exact opposite of what they are looking for. Nevertheless, many wholesalers have such a deployment at the top of their list. It should be a - we'll get to it eventually - item. Wholesalers who have invested heavily in this strategy have told us the gain at best was a mere 3% in sales. That’s a lot of time and money for 3%.
ElectricSmarts is taking another tact and it's to the benefit of our partners. We're looking to help our partners make minimal investments while reducing the cost of bidding, swapping products they carry and want to sell, doing pushbutton spec bundling, adding manufacturer's products to contractor databases, eventually connecting to the wholesaler's backend and more. In short, we are continually examining the way that the industry currently works and using ecommerce products and strategies to make it smarter, quicker, and easier to use in-place tools. It's always easier to get customers to modify something they already know than to coax them into doing something completely different.
If this makes sense to you and you are frustrated spending your resources on ecommerce solutions that give you little in return, make it a point to come by the ElectricSmarts suite in Tampa at the NAED meeting for a complete presentation by President Keith Peck. We promise you it will be a O YEAH, I GET THAT moment.
To guarantee a time slot its best to contact us now.
Paul Werthman
PaulWerthman@ElectricSmarts.com
Tel: 860 266 5359
Cell: 603-716-0302
Here's the next round of innovation from ElectricSmarts and NetPak.
To reply to this article or contact the writer bfloyd@electricsmarts.com
Why does everybody assume that just because Amazon has been amazingly successful with the Shopping Cart approach in the consumer market, that this is the only and most effective way to do ecommerce? Thinking it through tells you that the contractor market and the consumer market are like night and day. Yet, wholesalers continue to pour dollars and other resources into replicate a model that is yes, slowly progressing into our industry, but while chasing this strategy, they are doing so at the expense of leaving billions of dollars in low hanging orders on the table.
Think about it. Up to 60% of a distributor's business comes from contractors. Unlike Aunt Millie's holiday shopping, for contractors buying products is just another necessary but tedious task to accomplish. It’s a get-in-and-get-it-done as quickly as possible, with no hassles TASK. Picking hundreds of products to place into a shopping cart is the last thing they want to do. The only button they want to press is the EASY button. Shopping carts for large, complicated contractor jobs are the exact opposite of what they are looking for. Nevertheless, many wholesalers have such a deployment at the top of their list. It should be a - we'll get to it eventually - item. Wholesalers who have invested heavily in this strategy have told us the gain at best was a mere 3% in sales. That’s a lot of time and money for 3%.
ElectricSmarts is taking another tact and it's to the benefit of our partners. We're looking to help our partners make minimal investments while reducing the cost of bidding, swapping products they carry and want to sell, doing pushbutton spec bundling, adding manufacturer's products to contractor databases, eventually connecting to the wholesaler's backend and more. In short, we are continually examining the way that the industry currently works and using ecommerce products and strategies to make it smarter, quicker, and easier to use in-place tools. It's always easier to get customers to modify something they already know than to coax them into doing something completely different.
If this makes sense to you and you are frustrated spending your resources on ecommerce solutions that give you little in return, make it a point to come by the ElectricSmarts suite in Tampa at the NAED meeting for a complete presentation by President Keith Peck. We promise you it will be a O YEAH, I GET THAT moment.
To guarantee a time slot its best to contact us now.
Paul Werthman
PaulWerthman@ElectricSmarts.com
Tel: 860 266 5359
Cell: 603-716-0302
Here's the next round of innovation from ElectricSmarts and NetPak.
To reply to this article or contact the writer bfloyd@electricsmarts.com
