Oscommerce Case Studies
Here are some case studies on some of our clients websites. They share their thoughts on their experiences with their websites. For these businesses their website is a very important and core part of their business.
Keith Bowden Elecrtical
www.kbe.com.au
We are an Adelaide family business established in 1965 selling Domestic electrical appliances such as refrigerators, Clothes Washers TV’s etc.
We setup up our first website in the 1990s mainly as web space tied into our email account. At the time it was a static window for our bricks and mortar address and our brands.
When we first set up the website, mobile phones were just phones and consumers were prepared to drive from shop to shop to compare price and service.
Now days clients use the internet to check for pricing and stock across a number of websites including ours. Customer expectation is that all the details on price and stock are at their finger tips.
Our product and market is more suited to hands on sales and a large percent of new customers are now ringing or coming into the shop saying they saw the product on our website.
To survive in our dynamic market we need a website that is easily updated with good local support.
We often run promotions for a set period and we can’t afford for the website to be updated by a 3rd party in Asia days or weeks late.
We also gain credibility with our suppliers by having a successful website and we have to work very closely with our suppliers to get stock and pricing information.
The national companies have vast resources to put into their websites and we only have a small back office team so we had to design the website to fit in with our existing infrastructure and use our size and single site to our advantage.
We also use social media through face book and I can see face book or the next generation of face book as a very important tool for quickly reaching out to our market quickly and very cost effectively.
Splashes Online
www.splashesonline.com.au
Splashes Online is an online store catering to the retail market Australia Wide selling a wide range of pool and beach inflatables and accessories.
We have had a website for approx 5 years and we are constantly making improvement to the website such as improved pictures, adding more products, creating a customer rewards system and generally improving the overall look of the site.
The website is only a part of our business as we do have a store in Melbourne and do onsite servicing, however we have gone from only selling a small amount to well over $200,000 a year just off our website which is significantly adding to our businesses profitability. As business progresses without the aid of a well run website we would not be able to survive as more an more customers are going online to compare pricing and to find information.
We also advertise on Google and have improved the overall ranking of the website to now be on pages 1-3 for most of our targeted keywords.
This means whenever someone searches for the products we sell we have a greater chance of drawing them into our website.
The main challenge of selling online is to keep up with the competition in regards to pricing and new products that constantly become available. The customer does now research products and is well aware of the best price that they can buy their item for and it is important to keep pricing in check.
We have not gone into social media such as Facebook or Twitter as yet but are keeping it in mind.
Our postal address is PO Box 2028 South Plympton SA 5038.
