Flying high with e-commerce
By Dave Nienberg, President/CEO
Copyright © 2000 Dave Nienberg. All rights Reserved

In June of 1999, 4 Guys Interactive launched a re-designed site for The Airplane Shop. At the time we felt that their sales would improve as a result, but we had no idea by how much. In December, a mere 6 months later, we had our answer and the results were astounding. Sales from the web site increased by over 140% and total sales for the companies were up 8%. Without the improved web site total sales for the company would have remained flat or even perhaps decreased.
   In this case study we attempt to identify how the site became successful by looking at the past, present and future; identifying the key elements that are necessary to have to compete online today.

Past
The previous version of The Airplane Shop site had some major holes in it. Far and away the biggest problem was architecture of the site. It was entirely static (each product was coded by hand) which made updates difficult, time consuming and error prone. Additionally, it was extremely difficult to find products due to confusing categorization, had an uninspiring look and feel, had a low amount of visitors to the site and customers could order out of stock products.
   As a result, the web site only produced 29% of total orders for the company, compared to 71% through catalogue sales. Clearly the web was working in terms of making sales but there was a lot of room for improvement.
We came in and analyzed the business problems and came up with the following solutions:

Problem: Out of stock items can be ordered.
Solution: Integrate the current accounting system database into the site to manage inventory. The accounting database was seriously flawed and required a substantial amount of work to make it "web-ready." We had to manually review and add information to over 7000 products to enable the database to be used on the web.

Problem: Difficulty in locating products.
Solution: Categorize every product in multiple ways. For example, airplanes can be searched for by manufacturer, model, military or commercial. We also integrated a search engine into the site to further simplify finding products.

Problem: Not enough visitors to the web site.
Solution: Create an affiliates program. We developed the tracking mechanisms that allow the site to recognize where customers come from. With this information we calculate monthly commission checks for the affiliates based on sales that originate from the affiliate's site.

1. Ease of use for the user - customers consistently praise the ease of use of the site. Products are infinitely easier to find and order now.

2. Affiliates program - over 18% of all sales now come from online affiliates. These affiliates link to the site and when a purchase is made, they earn a commission that is paid monthly. These are all sales that wouldn't have been made otherwise.

3. Administration area - the entire site is now updateable by The Airplane Shop's staff. The administration area allows for instant changes to be made which keeps the site fresh and new.

4. Featured products - each major section of the site and the home page have one or more products featured and available to purchase. By emphasizing products on the section pages and home page, orders increase by 250% to 700% respectively.

Future
While the present site is certainly an improvement over the old one, everything isn't perfect. A web site (particularly an e-commerce site) should always be viewed as a work in progress and never complete. In the next year we may implement several improvements to the site to improve the customer experience, reduce maintenance and improve sales. Some of these items are:

1. Include pictures for all products - the number one complaint people have is that all the products don't have pictures. While there are many more pictures on the site than in the catalogue, web customers expect to be able to see what they're buying. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this. Every product must be setup, shot with a digital camera and then uploaded to the site. For The Airplaneshop, this represents close to 1000 hours of work on their end.

2. Improve and expand back-end reporting features - currently the web site sales are tracked in Excel after being re-keyed from the web site. This is clearly inefficient and time-consuming. Two options for improvements exist. First and probably the best option is to simply create an "Export to Excel" program that will create an Excel file for further manipulation. We've already developed a custom program to do this and will most likely go this route. The other option is to create web-based reports. While this option is great for instant real-time feedback, it's time consuming and limited. A hybrid of these two options is a great choice as well. By implementing both you get the benefit of being able to infinitely manipulate the data while also being able to read the site's "pulse" at any given moment.

3. Order Status - since most items are shipped via UPS or FedEx we can easily keep customers up to date on the status of their shipment automatically with tracking numbers. Before the order is shipped (in particular with orders for future products) we can also let customers know when to expect their orders. Customer service on the web is no different than in the bricks and mortar world. So, anything you can do to keep people out of the dark is a giant plus.

For more information contact us at: info@4guys.com