Opinion: E-tailing vs Bricks and Mortar

E-tailers are today a fact of life and present a unique challenge to the traditional channel. This is a challenge that we have to accept, and evolve our businesses to address.

Most consumers will now head straight for the internet to make purchases, they are confident of the service they will receive and often expect to get the best price online. This is especially true for commodity based products.

Catalogues, flyers and adverts are now mere tools to drive people online to view and purchase.

Price is not the only driver for online sales however, convenience plays a large factor.

People want to shop as and when they want, they want 24 hour access to their shopping portals. They want to be able to access and research information on the options available to them and gain insight into other people’s experiences with those products.

The key challenge to resellers and vendors is to structure their businesses to cater to both e-tailers and their traditional bricks and mortar resellers.

They need to establish and develop a successful relationship with both channels.

Bricks and mortar resellers provide local hands on advice and recommendations, and deliver after sales support and technical service, especially important for consumers in rural areas of Australia.

Vendors also need the web-presence of the e-channel, to ensure that information and products are available on-line where potential customers may go to check information and pricing.

The key to making this a successful balancing act is the voidance of a price war, which is no good for anyone.

If e-tailers are significantly eroding margins for resellers you will quickly find yourself with products that no-one wants to range or support.

Bricks and mortar resellers need to have access to additional products and services to reward them for stocking your product range, especially when in a showroom environment. They need to be able to differentiate their service from the simple purchase model of the e-tailer channel.

High end MFP products need to be priced at a level through distribution to allow the e-tailers to sell your product while having a different price level for Bricks and Mortar resellers so that they can’t be priced out of a deal.

Essential to making this work is putting an agreement in place, to not list these offers online, as part of your go to market strategy.

The one thing that we can be sure of in all this is that Google is going to become richer as e-tailers become more creative in selecting key words to ensure a high ranking in Google searches and also purchase sponsored ads.

To compete and stay in the game, dealers and resellers need to ensure that they’re building their e-commerce area so that they are in the market and evolving this side of their offering

A low cost model needs to be in place for dealers and resellers so that all processes end to end are streamlined and automated.

Dealers and resellers have to be mindful that if they don’t fill this void many vendors will, and in fact some have already done it.

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