Friday 21 March 2014

Sharing the online sales pie

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.

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