What to look for in an e-commerce platform
What should you look for in an e-commerce platform? We ask Product Director, Richard Sinclair for his thoughts on the essential features you should look for in an e-commerce system.
Office Power: What features are crucial in a back office solution?
Richard Sinclair: Customers are shopping online more and more. Dealers need to offer a multi-channel experience that has e-commerce at the heart of their strategy. If dealers are to keep their customers, as well as win new ones, it’s critical that an e-commerce solution support that strategy.
Office Power has invested £2m in technology and our systems provide dealers with:
- Anytime/anywhere access
- Easy to use dashboards, designed with user experience at front of mind
- Multi-layered pricing and promotional functionality
- Alert systems to identify opportunities to grow
- Dealer Specific Product capability
- Fully integrated (and real time) reporting suite
- Customer RFM and Product Movement GAP analysis
- Product and Content CMS
- Marketing Tools
- Inbuilt administration and finance management functions
- Management of customer acquisition, order processing, fulfilment control, management of
- suppliers, stock, invoices, pricing, credit statements and customer queries
- A single end to end e-retail solution with a fully integrated branded website
OP: How can dealers ensure they have the right product information?
RS: Catalogues are useful for many dealers, but the online world is much more important and valuable now. Dealers must offer accurate product data including full attributes, descriptions, ranges, buyer guides, videos and imagery with zoom functionality are all key requirements to help convert a customer.
For dealers to be able to manage this, it’s important to partner with technology partners that have the capacity to manage these vast databases of product information. Office Power have a direct relationship with manufacturers and wholesalers, with a focus on enhancing product data to assist conversion.
Images can increase conversion by 85%, this is why we ensure that products have correct descriptions and attributes, but are also displayed in a way that helps to engage the customer.
OP: How can dealers climb up the search engine rankings?
RS: We employ SEO experts and use our own technology, built in-house by our development team, so we can monitor Google activity and release code enhancements every two weeks.
This enables us to ensure that we provide our dealers with websites that are optimised, include metadata and tags, keyword optimisation and site performance optimisation. We also ensure that our dealers’ websites are built in a way that allows Google to crawl them efficiently.
Office Power gives dealers the lot. We also help with social media strategies as we know social signals are a key indicator for Google and a real benefit for SEO. We have a direct relationship with Google and an account manager who works with us to ensure we optimise our websites correctly.
OP: Can dealers measure their return on investment when investing in e-commerce systems?
RS: Absolutely, if the e-commerce system delivers real time data and provides tools to see opportunities for growth, whilst saving the dealer time and make them profitable, it’s easy to see the ROI. Office Power’s solution is tailored to each dealer and provides all of this.
We support the dealers to achieve their individual needs. Some dealers need more time, others need a holiday for the first time in years and for many, the opportunity to see their business become successful in the modern climate is the dream ROI.
OP: What sort of backup support do dealers need to look out for?
RS: Dealers should aim to partner with a single outsourcing solution built specifically for them. They should steer away from large, faceless technology providers and off the shelf solutions. Instead, partner with a technology supplier with people at the forefront, there to look after them 24/7.
At Office Power, we have built all of our own technology and have a strong in-house team who can provide technical support across all areas of business. All our systems speak to each other, there’s no third party software involved, and this makes the process for our dealers glitch-free and very smooth.
