What makes a great eCommerce website? Leaders in online selling generate impressive revenues every year - What is the secret to their success? Is it pricing? Ease of use? Cross selling? No, these are all merely effects of an underlying cause. Companies that drive new revenue streams and develop new customer relationships with their websites are successful because they commit to a comprehensive strategy. They understand that, out of the many factors, most important is the core function of eCommerce: Facilitating online sales.
In other words, successful companies make every element of their website and every step of the online selling process as easy and optimized as possible. The visual design is clean, professional, and straightforward. Customers know how to find the products they are looking for, gain the information they need to place an order, and easily understand the order process. A great eCommerce website meets its customer's needs, but there's a lot more to consider behind the scenes.
It is easy to ignore the administrative side, which is equally important. All too often, companies put a lot of effort into the customer experience without thinking about how to efficiently administer their eCommerce website. An effective website will organize orders, making it easy to handle purchases and notify customers about order status. Business is constantly changing, and it must be efficient to update inventory information, upload data sheets and images for your products, and change the featured products and information on your homepage.
The final, crucial element in the equation was the focus of last month's newsletter: Getting customers to your website in the first place. Since a great design is meaningless if there are no customers coming to use it, a solid search engine strategy is critical for success in online selling. There are a lot of marketing strategies available to begin funneling in prospective customers from search engines and listing sites, but a search engine-friendly website design is your foundation.
A company profits from its eCommerce website is because it commits to a comprehensive strategy. It understands that, like many things in business, success in online selling depends on a balance of many factors. Building the online branch of your business is becoming more and more important. Whether your company is venturing into online sales for the first time, or thinking about ways to enhance an existing sales website, think about these principles and whether the customer experience, administrative backend, and basic foundation of your website is doing its part to facilitate online sales.
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.
We are pleased to announce a sales partnership with SourceESB to provide comprehensive eCommerce packages for electronics distributors. The packages, starting at $9,000, will include our distribution eCommerce system and SourceESB's online sales lead generation program.
For more information, please contact us or your SourceESB representative. Here is our recent press release in its entirety:
SourceESB and DistiSuite eCommerce Offer Dedicated eCommerce Selling Solution
NEW YORK, NY (April 22 , 2009) - Penton Media's SourceESB online electronic components sourcing tool, the tool of choice for purchasing agents and design and development engineers, and DistiSuite, a developer of online business applications for distributors, today announced a sales partnership that packages DistiSuite eCommerce - a dedicated online selling solution for distributors - with SourceESB's online lead generation program.
"SourceESB is looking forward to beginning this new association. DistiSuite is a complimentary eCommerce solution for the small to mid range electronic component distributors to compete with larger distributors in the global market." Christina Cavano, Director of Operations, SourceESB.
SourceESB and DistiSuite will partner to offer three tiered packages with a range of features and options for distributors to manage eCommerce on their websites.
"With each passing year, it becomes more crucial for distributors to tap into online sales channels. Until now, costs and administrative issues made the transition to eCommerce quite challenging, particularly for small to mid-sized distributors," said Cheyne Rood, Director of Sales and Marketing at DistiSuite. "Because we have focused on distribution-specific features, our clients find it much easier to integrate our system with their existing administrative process. We are very pleased to partner with SourceESB, an unmatched leader in the electronic components industry. SourceESB's lead generation is a perfect complement for eCommerce, and we feel these packages provide a great 1-2 punch for distributors that want to take full advantage of the online marketplace."
About SourceESB
For over the 25 years, OEM and CEM buyers and engineers have relied on SourceESB when sourcing electronic components, products and services. The online and print directory list thousands of component distributors, manufacturers, and service providers. SourceESB is an essential tool for today's busy electronics professional. Distributor listings are verified, and authorization status of each distributor is verified directly with the manufacturer. Therefore, information about thousands of electronic parts and products is completely dependable and accessible when a buyer or engineer needs it most.
About Penton Media
Penton Media, Inc. is the largest independent business-to-business media company in the U.S., serving more than six million business professionals every month. The company's market-leading brands are focused on 30 industries and include 113 trade magazines, 145 Web sites, 150 industry trade shows and conferences, and more than 500 information data products. Headquartered in New York City, the privately held company is owned by MidOcean Partners and U.S. Equity Partners II, an investment fund sponsored by Wasserstein & Co., LP, and its co-investors. For additional information on the company and its businesses, visit www.penton.com.
About DistiSuite
DistiSuite is a developer of scalable, online business applications specifically for distributors. Its flagship application, DistiSuite eCommerce, equips distributor websites with an online selling system that eases the financial and administrative challenges commonly associated with web-based sales. Most of DistiSuite's clients are small to mid-sized distributors in the electronics components industry. Additional information about the privately held company can be found at http://www.distisuite.com.
Welcome to our shiny, new 'Newsletter'. Each month I will post our newsletter about eCommerce for the Electronics Distribution Industry.
To receive our newsletter each month via email, please drop me a line: cheyner (at) distisuite (dot) com.
Also feel free to contact me directly with questions, or if you simply would like to talk about eCommerce in general. I hope you find my newsletters helpful!
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