Finding New Customers Online With Ecommerce:

Go type one of your part numbers or manufacturers into Google. Take a look at the search results. Is your company there? If it is not, it could be. Based on the way the market is heading, it should be. So how does your company get to be among Google's 'chosen few'?

When you transition to online sales, you should think about how customers are going to find your website. On the web in particular, your competitive pricing, service, and inventory are meaningless if nobody knows you exist.

Many electronics distributors use listing sites like EEM or netCOMPONENTS . These are powerful resources, and are even more effective when you have a website allowing customers to "Buy Now". There are other marketing strategies, but today I would like to focus on how the very foundation of your website can impact your customer traffic.

Let's take a moment to talk about the importance of your website's structure and contents. Search engine companies like Google and Yahoo! use automated computers to analyze millions and millions of websites every day. These crawling computers collect information and, over time, this information is used when creating and ranking search results.

The more information available on your website, and organized in a way for crawling computers to find it, the better the opportunity for your company to appear in a wider range of search results and with a better ranking. Appearing in more search results means more web traffic, which means more prospective customers.

For many of you, information that would help market your website is already available in your inventory management software, such as part numbers, manufacturers, categories, etc. That said, to manually transfer that data onto your website (and in a way that is search engine-friendly) can be impractical for upwards of a thousand parts.

At DistiSuite, we provide eCommerce solutions specifically for electronics distributors. One of the features we have developed is a way to automatically integrate and update such information on your website with a single spreadsheet file upload. I hope you found this newsletter helpful, and please do not hesitate to contact us to learn more about this topic and the services we provide.