eCommerce and

As I am slowly working my way up to “Excel Guru” around the office, I have been asked formula questions and excel functions that I never even knew existed. I remember the sense of accomplishment I felt when I wrote my first nested if-then function (that worked), ran my first advanced filter and created my first macro, all without having to ask for help. I felt like I could do anything in excel! The day I learned how to create a macro that would run several advanced filters for me, at two keystrokes, I danced around the office!

One day my manager came to me with a large excel file. He had all of his fields separated out into highly specific, individual cells that spanned across many, many columns. He needed the data from several columns and rows to be combined and shown in one cell. So, I needed a way to merge together several cells. The standard Merge Cell Feature in excel is helpful, but limiting. I searched the internet for a few minutes before I found the Merge Cell Wizard. This feature allows you to merge cells row by row as well as column by column.  What is great about the Merge Cells Wizard is that you can specify what separator to use: comma, tab, return, etc.

Needless to say, I was thrilled that I was able to complete the task. Using this plug-in saved hours, if not days worth of work. You can get the plug-in for a fee through www.ablebits.com, or search for a free download that will offer a 30 day trial. If it is a tool that you will utilize often, it is worth every penny! 

The promotional potential in packaging and shipping a product can be immense, when materials are utilized correctly. PlumberSurplus.com used to offer each of our suppliers branded packing tape.  Each package they shipped for us, they would use our tape, with our logo on it. It was a great selling point, suppliers loved it, and we got our name plastered on thousands of shipments that went to the United States and Canada. Sounds like a win–win situation right?

Wrong.

Let me recap for you the problems we ran into. First, we started growing so quickly that we could hardly keep our suppliers stocked with enough tape. We seemed to continuously have boxes of branded tape on order from our vendor. Second, what had been purposed as a several hundred dollar promotional opportunity quickly became a several thousand dollar promotional opportunity. We were willing to keep supplying the tape, and did, in fact, for a few years until we started monitoring returns. This was the third and final problem. We began to notice that our returns were coming back, not with our branded tape used as a seal across the box, appropriate for branding our name on the box, but it was being used to hold boxes together! Any promotional aspect went right out the window when the tape was so overlaid that you could not read the text. We began to closely monitor returns for “tape abuse” and found that many suppliers were taking advantage of the branded tape. We decided to pull the branded tape from suppliers, and instead asked that they use the traditional clear packing tape that they use on the rest of their shipments.

Now, this is not to say that if you have only a couple facilities that make up your shipping departments, that you cannot control the use of the branded tape in such a way that it holds promotional value. In fact, in our infancy the branded tape was a great feature for us to utilize. 

Anthony Abram has written several articles on, and or related to, packing tape, and its promotional benefits. I would recommend reading them before making your decision.

In his article “Packing Tape Facilitates Commerce” Anthony strongly emphasizes the use of tape over other box sealants, and branded tape over clear packing tape. I would agree with him on all points, until the promotional value becomes mute due to abuse. He even explains how the packages are prime real-estate for your logo. 

So, how does PlumberSurplus.com take advantage of the prime real-estate we have from shipping thousands of products around the country? We have began investigating the use of branded stickers, much like you already see on boxes. Kohler uses an embossed foil sticker, UPS utilizes colored stickers to designate different levels of services, and many other manufacturers use branded stickers to complete their packaging. A sticker offers the same promotional potential as tape. You can put your logo, contact information, slogan, etc. on the sticker, and you can better monitor their use by instructing that suppliers are to put one sticker on the top of each package. You can even monitor their use, down to the sticker by tracking how many stickers each supplier is sent, how many orders they have processed and the number of boxes used per order. In this example, you would be able to tell when a supplier is running low because you will be able to see that you sent 500 stickers, and they have shipped 450 orders, with one box used per order.

As far as cost goes, from our research, the difference between the cost of tape on a box, and the cost of a sticker per box is miniscule. If you are questioning the promotional potential for your company in branded tape, the main factors to analyze are cost and who is going to be using it. If you have control over the output, branded tape is a great promotional avenue.

10. Schedule your inventory! Do not come to work one morning and decide that you have extra time that day and begin an inventory…this is the first ingredient of a disaster! This headache is definitely avoidable.

9. Let others know when you are completing your inventory. This includes your customers. Let them know that for that day (or two) that you will not be fulfilling orders due to inventory. Alerting others of your plans will help curb unnecessary requests for quantity available and shipping statuses.

8. Go through your warehouse the week or day before your scheduled inventory and set aside and label any areas that have a specific purpose, or that are known trouble areas. Some examples could be:

• “Missing Pieces” for any product that is missing anything
• “Damaged” for any product that has visible damage to it
• “Individual Quantities” for items in packs/cartons that need to be counted individually

6. If using a computer generated report for counting, ensure that there is adequate space for noting any discrepancies. Some notes that you will want room for are:

• Actual quantity on hand available for shipment
• Number of damages
• Number with missing pieces
• Misc.

 
5. Ensure that your method of counting is intact. If scanning, ensure that all scanners are charged and their connections are working before you begin. If counting, it is best to delegate colors, in case you get interrupted. For example, for every item counted you can put a yellow slash somewhere on it, then on your sheet (since you are using the age old counting method you will have the report in your hand) decide what number intervals to mark (i.e. 5, 10, 25).

4. Color coding is always a good organizational technique that can allow many people to communicate effectively. If you are going to color code, ensure that there are plenty of supplies (stickers, markers) for everyone. Some examples of how you could use colored markers or stickers are:

• Counted Product
• Damaged Product
• Needs manager attention

This is especially helpful if you have a team that is completing the inventory, each member with a specific job. If it is a task of one person to continuously go through and pull all inventory marked as damaged to the “Damages” section, then the products should be appropriately marked for that team member.

1. Pray for patience.

Approaching potential suppliers as a relatively new, rapidly growing, eCommerce company, we typically get one of three reactions. On one extreme, some suppliers will be more than supportive, willing to jump in head first and give us all available data and product they offer. We love these suppliers. Others are willing to take the eCommerce gamble, but with a limited stake in the investment; they give us some of their product offering and are mainly interested in testing the waters. The other extreme is a supplier who is typically an older brick and mortar company, that is in its fourth generation of ownership. They are uninterested in expanding into the unknown and are much more comfortable where they are. We understand where they are coming from… eCommerce can be risky business.

Since the first reaction is the best, and what we hope for in every prospective meeting, our data department is ready at a whim to tackle large projects and upload hundreds if not thousands of products in one sweep. The third reaction, though it does not happen frequently, does come up on occasion, and we cordially finish lunch, shake the suppliers hand, and walk away chuckling to ourselves. We just sat through an entire lunch with complete strangers, pouring their heart out about how they are ready for expansion; how they want to grow but cannot find the right opportunity – but when we present an opportunity to them, it is too adventurous.  It’s the middle of the line suppliers, the lukewarm suppliers, the “that sounds great but I’m too skeptical” suppliers that require a lot of time and attention by our supply chain management.

Now, I work in Supply Chain Management, not in data, analytics or marketing. So not only am I not an expert in search engine optimization, but I can barely describe the difference between paid and organic search results. However, I do know that if you have a site about plumbing, the more pages about plumbing that you have the more relevant your site will be.  This may not be the exact case but a simple example of this is as follows: When we have 15 Kohler products, we are more relevant in search engines than if we had 1. Let’s expand: If we had 15,000 Kohler products, we are more relevant in search engines than if we had 1,000. That makes sense. The more we have of a product offering, the more relevant we are to people searching for those products. Let’s go a step further. If we have 15,000 Kohler products and 15,000 Moen products, we are more relevant than if we just had Kohler products alone.

To transition this to sales, higher relevancy equals higher organic results, which equals higher volume of traffic on our website. We all know, higher traffic means higher sales. So, what we can do to increase sales? The simple answer…broaden our product offering. Sounds like an easy concept, right?

Explaining this to a supplier, especially a supplier that is interested in expansion, but not interested waiting the time it takes to develop good product descriptions and search engine relevancy, becomes a difficult task. We have often sat in meetings with lukewarm suppliers asking, “Why aren’t we selling more products?” We kindly try to explain, usually for more than the tenth time, that if they will expand their product offering, we will sell more of their products. Why? We will be more relevant in search results.

When we approach our suppliers, we come to the table realizing our core competencies as well as theirs. The relationship works best, when suppliers stick to their competencies, and let us stick to ours. If they give us the product, we will sell it. Our ability to sell their products is directly related to the breadth of the product made available to us.

So, how do we ask a supplier for all of their product offering? Simple, we run a report of their competitor that is giving us 100% of their product offering, and show them the difference in sales volume. If we do not already have a comparable product, the report generated would be of one of our competitors, offering a similar product line. This gets the results we are looking for every time.

"the rule of reason is the accepted standard" for determining whether a case is in violation of antitrust law. He [Kennedy] argued that a bevy of economic evidence exists to support the claim that price-setting agreements can actually promote competition and is "unlikely to have anticompetitive effects."  

• curbs loss leaders
• encourages healthy competition
• increases customer service efforts

Loss Leaders

Loss leaders is a marketing terms used to describe a pricing strategy that markets products at a significantly reduced price in order to attract customer’s attention. Retailers count on customers purchasing the discounted product along with products that are not discounted. This can be an effective strategy, however, the downside is when an entire business model is to be the “low price leader” and subsequently undercuts all their competition with low prices.

 It is not uncommon for internet retailers to receive several legal notices a week regarding strict adherence to manufacturer’s IMAP’s. The reality is, few e-tailers acknowledge manufacturer IMAP’s. Some online companies do not always focus on customer service to win customer loyalty, instead they depend on loss leaders. E-tailers that depend on loss leaders will ignore manufacturer IMAP’s under the presumption that the legal battle is too expensive for the manufacturer to go after every e-tailer; therefore they will probably not face consequences. When not all e-tailers follow the IMAP policy, it is difficult for one or two companies to agree to manufacturer price minimums, when they know the outcome is decreased sales. The decision ultimately becomes: loose business to competitors vs. obey the IMAP.

Healthy Competition

Healthy competition, among retailers and e-tailers a like, ensures an improved customer experience. Healthy competition revolves around:
availability of product information

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