From a suppliers point of view it isn't always best to give one particular online company exclusivity for selling your brand online.
From the view point of an online retailer they would love exclusivity on a particular brand as they are not sharing the sales with any other business, other than possibly competing with the High Street if the products are also sold that way.
This isn't always the best option for brand managers to go down, as while it is true to some extent that as the number of online retailers increase, the market doesn't get any bigger, so the slices of the sales pie become a little smaller. This however doesn't necessarily equal the same number of sales for the supplier. It can be quite the opposite in fact.
Consumers use keywords in many different ways to search for product. One way might be that the consumer knows what they want, but haven't made up their mind on brand name and model yet. The keywords they would use here are fairly generic, such as 'waterproof cycling jacket review'.
Another way might be that the consumer already knows the exact product they are looking for and search using the brand name and model as keywords.
Either way, in search engine results, the more space a brand has the better exposure it gets. This isn't going to be achieved with only one online seller. True, the consumer searching for the brand and model will still find what they are looking for but the brand also looses some of it's potential space on the sales pie.
This doesn't mean the aim should be to get the product on every website in the country occupying search space. A brand manager should still be looking for a balance working only with good quality online businesses that care about the products they sell.
Friday 21 March 2014
Thursday 20 March 2014
The politics of business to consumer pricing
One of the biggest challenges of selling online is your pricing strategy. Get this right and your business will sing. It sounds easy doesn't it?
Of course there are many other factors which will make your business sing but pricing is right at the heart of any business, and we will have plenty of time later to talk about some of the challenges in retailing online.
I'll start from the beginning. The dawn of the internet age changed the face of retail, and the way products are sold around the world, forever. The buying habits of the consumer were revolutionised. Prior to the internet the consumer had no real means of researching price without a huge amount of work and travel. A products price was more or less accepted.
The internet opened up a whole new opportunity for the consumer to compare prices across a range of retailers which naturally saw online businesses competing on price to win sales.
This is where we start to get on the politics of pricing. For the sake of this article we are going to say that a typical online retailer sells several brands from several suppliers on their website. While it might be illegal for a supplier to tell a retailer how much they should sell the products for, they can stop supplying product to a retailer without giving a reason. This becomes relevant when suppliers protect the brands they sell by requesting the products are not discounted, either at all or below a certain level. Stray below this threshold and you may find you can no longer obtain these goods.
Is this a good thing? Well it is a game changer from the point of view that you can't compete on price with these brands. You need other ways to stand out above the competition in a level playing field.
Why would a brand want to control the consumer price? Well there are many reasons, most of which are there to protect the longevity of the businesses that sell their products. Without it the High Street stores wouldn't be able to compete on price and it would be no longer financially viable to sell these products in store. The brands then loose valuable retail shelf space. Even if you take the High Street out of the equation, without such a policy it is a race to the bottom on price, and these brands can be used by online retailers as loss leaders.
If you are thinking about starting an online business you need to think about these challenges and build them into your business plan.
Of course there are many other factors which will make your business sing but pricing is right at the heart of any business, and we will have plenty of time later to talk about some of the challenges in retailing online.
I'll start from the beginning. The dawn of the internet age changed the face of retail, and the way products are sold around the world, forever. The buying habits of the consumer were revolutionised. Prior to the internet the consumer had no real means of researching price without a huge amount of work and travel. A products price was more or less accepted.
The internet opened up a whole new opportunity for the consumer to compare prices across a range of retailers which naturally saw online businesses competing on price to win sales.
This is where we start to get on the politics of pricing. For the sake of this article we are going to say that a typical online retailer sells several brands from several suppliers on their website. While it might be illegal for a supplier to tell a retailer how much they should sell the products for, they can stop supplying product to a retailer without giving a reason. This becomes relevant when suppliers protect the brands they sell by requesting the products are not discounted, either at all or below a certain level. Stray below this threshold and you may find you can no longer obtain these goods.
Is this a good thing? Well it is a game changer from the point of view that you can't compete on price with these brands. You need other ways to stand out above the competition in a level playing field.
Why would a brand want to control the consumer price? Well there are many reasons, most of which are there to protect the longevity of the businesses that sell their products. Without it the High Street stores wouldn't be able to compete on price and it would be no longer financially viable to sell these products in store. The brands then loose valuable retail shelf space. Even if you take the High Street out of the equation, without such a policy it is a race to the bottom on price, and these brands can be used by online retailers as loss leaders.
If you are thinking about starting an online business you need to think about these challenges and build them into your business plan.
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