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WEBSTORE MANAGERS

ADDRESS OPPORTUNITIES, CHALLENGES
THAT COME WITH E-COMMERCE

Customers across the globe are increasingly preferring online means to purchase goods and services, with the number of digital buyers expected to grow to 2.2 billion by 2021, and that fact has not escaped electrical distributors. When IMARK Electrical conducted an E-Commerce Vision Statement Survey last year to help member executives identify their current e-commerce opportunities and challenges, most member execs (63%) agreed that companies that do not invest in e-commerce and digital marketing will most likely lose market share in the next several years. However, 42% of those surveyed have yet to make it easy for customers to see their complete product offering on their website.

Change doesn’t come easy in the electrical distribution industry and getting any organization started down the path to e-commerce is challenging on several levels. Even after management comes to terms with e-commerce being a viable and sustainable new sales channel, investments of time and money must be made. Other issues may also arise, such as getting internal buy-in from sales reps who fear e-commerce may replace them or have an impact on their income.

To help IMARK distributors determine if e-commerce makes sense for their companies and customers now or in the near future, IMARK Electrical Now reached out to two member companies that have created robust digital resources for their customers and hired dedicated staff to manage them.

Inline Electric, which has 15 locations across Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, including six lighting showrooms, has had a webstore for more than five years. Cayce Mill Supply, which has five locations and two design centers in Kentucky, initiated its world of online selling in 2010.

When it comes to introducing e-commerce into a distributorship, Aaron Hutchens, web manager at Inline Electric, said it is important to make the webstore a tool to help the sales team, not an employee’s competition. “Make sure webstore sales count toward the sales of the branches doing the work,” he said. “Also, push a lot of traffic toward your brick-and-mortar stores, so new customers online are coming through the door.”

Laura Sargeant, e-commerce, Cayce Mill Supply, said her company has gained support from its traditional outside sales department by coordinating onsite customer webstore trainings with the sales team, structuring sales team incentives around online customer recruitment and offering web purchase incentives with customer growth sales promotions.

Once a distributor garners internal support for a webstore, the next challenge is getting contractors to take their first steps into the virtual branch to look around. When they decide to take those first steps, the webstore must function properly. “The advantage of online shopping is the convenience,” Sargeant said.

“They need to feel comfortable with the store’s functions and navigation. Are the attributes, filters and taxonomy precise and relevant? Are the keywords and contractor lingo associations uploaded and searchable? Is the checkout process straightforward?

The biggest challenge faced by a webstore manager is that the convenience of the virtual branch must outweigh the familiarity of the old brick-and-mortar branch.” Hutchens said Inline Electric has had more success attracting one-time buyers and new customers with its webstore. “Our existing customer base uses the site to check inventory or store information, but when it comes to purchases, they contact a salesman,” he said. “Many new contractor employees are accustomed to making many major purchases online, and we are working to stay ahead of the curve to make sure we are attracting their business.”

To engage more current customers with Cayce Mill’s webstore, Sargeant plans to create a virtual sales bin for dead stock (priced as low as the Cayces will allow) that can only be accessed through the webstore. “I would also like to have online purchase incentives,” she said. “For example, for every web dollar spent, the customer receives one chance to win this week’s ‘Win It Wednesday’ giveaway.”

To measure the success of the webstores they manage, Hutchens and Sargeant continuously monitor webstore traffic, the number of repeat customers and the number of online sales orders.

“Our Google Analytics account really helps us to see customer interaction with our website, which pages they are going to, where they are staying and what causes them to click away,” Hutchens said. “Of course, sales are important, but we also put a lot of focus on making our brick-and-mortar stores easily accessible from our site. Those interactions are a little harder to track, but we can see when customers go to specific store pages in order to get phone numbers or addresses.”

Even after a company’s webstore starts becoming popular and profitable, another challenge arises. “One big headache is dealing with fraud,” Hutchens said. “There are tools out there like Signifyd that help prevent fraud, but those tools only start making sense once you reach a certain sales threshold. As we try to scale our webstore, we want to take any big orders that come in, but we also have to be careful that we aren’t being scammed.”

When asked what characteristics distributors should look for when employing someone to manage their webstore, both Hutchens and Sargeant said successful managers are those with a willingness to learn and try new things. “The job really sits at a crossroads between a lot of different disciplines and specialties,” Hutchens said. “You need to either have a team that understands their roles or have the ability to outsource to experts, because you can’t do everything yourself and the demands of the internet are constantly changing.”

Sargeant agreed that e-commerce is always evolving. “The personal traits needed to be a successful webstore manager include being an independent worker, self-motivated, focused and well organized with an entrepreneurial spirit and a knowledge base to include strong computer skills and experience with customer service and retail sales,” she said. Sargeant said she was originally hired for web and catalog marketing at Cayce Mill in 2013. “I have degrees in marketing and management from the University of Kentucky along with an MBA from Murray State University,” she said. “I am now responsible for online sales and marketing at Cayce Mill Supply.”

Hutchens, who started his career working in journalism as a producer at a local NBC station, said he was initially hired to create content for the company’s web page and social media, coordinating with the marketing department and events team. “That quickly morphed into leading a website redesign and learning a great deal about web sales, search engine optimization, marketing, analytics, etc.,” he said.

Both Inline Electric and Cayce Mill know that small to midsized distributors will remain vital to the electrical industry for many years, as a result of their expertise, services and solutions. Neither company, however, wanted to risk seeing their product sales suffer as a result of not offering customers online shopping solutions. While both companies have faced and continue to face challenges while venturing further into e-commerce, they have also realized their webstores can free up manual processes that give sales reps more time to sell and that the web can also draw more customers into their brick-and-mortar locations.