You probably don’t even know it, but your existing web presence is frustrating your customers and potentially causing them to buy a competitors product. A long tradition of many brands that sell products through resellers is to include a dealer locator on your website. This dealer locator was once seen as a convenient way to let customers know who carries your products and which store they can buy them from. However, representing your products as a dealer does not necessarily mean they stock the intended product a customer is looking for or that they carry any of your products at all. Most retailers only carry on average about 20% of the product assortment a brand offers online. How do your consumers know who currently carries stock of a select item in blue other than to phone or visit stores? This is inconvenient and can deter a customer from buying your product(s). Questions begin to swirl in your customers mind, if a retailer doesn’t carry the product – is it no good?
Dealer Locators Extend the Path to Purchase
When a customer is ready to buy from your company after all the hard work of obtaining that customer and educating them about your products on your site you instead refer them to go elsewhere. This could include going to a physical store or spending time calling physical stores. All of these options extend the path to purchase making it harder for consumers to buy from you and your dealers.
Online Retailers Are Not the Solution Either
For the consumer that wants to buy online many brands leverage a select few key online eCommerce partners to sell. What this does is makes life much more difficult for all the other retailers in your network as these online eTailers are selling in your physical retailer territories. The online retailers also more than likely will not represent your product the same way you would. Other brands leverage Amazon, which fully intends to wipe out your physical dealers who provide value added services to customers. In addition feeding Amazon your data as to how your product is selling will most likely result in them competing with you one day, see blog post.
How Does ShipEarly Help?
If you have a dealer locator and not using an omnichannel eCommerce solution you could be providing a disservice to your customers. Our solution fairly and evenly distributes sales across your retail network to help elevate everyone’s sales while giving consumers the ability to shop online as 95% of consumers want this. In addition, we help eliminate time wasting the traditional dealer locator provides by sending customers to the right store, at the right time, with the right inventory. Even in the event the product is not in stock it can be shipped to the store.In the last mile when you had a customer ready to buy, your dealer locator is letting you down. If you want to increase your close ratio and let your website do more selling, consider our industry leading omnichannel eCommerce solution for your business. Customers today have much higher expectations and until now our service was unavailable to them. Let’s make it easy for your consumers, contact us and lets get started on your omnichannel strategy.
