Retailers look for ecommerce gains
An ecommerce initiative at Fort Wayne, Indiana-based Do it Best is bringing independent hardware stores and lumberyards a platform to compete at the highest level of ecommerce.
The platform, rolling out this summer is designed to let the co-op’s members maintain their retail independence while at the same time give them support for the back end tasks that often separate winners from losers in the increasingly complicated retail business.
HBSDealer spoke to three Do it Best members who have a front row seat on the progress. Here are the stories.
Telling a story that sells
Every business has a story to tell. But for Scott Jerousek, owner of Farm & Home Hardware in Ashland and Wellington, Ohio, there’s no story more important than the one that ends with the customer buying a product.
Jerousek, whose credentials include recognition as 2018 NHPA Top Gun and also as an HBSDealer Hardware Store All Star, says that telling a business’ story doesn’t mean plastering your home page with old-time photos. “It means telling the story of the products that differentiate our business from some of the others, and the service that comes with that,” he says.
He points to the outdoor living category, a strong suit for the rural Ohio retailer. “We need to be able to tell folks our story through different landing pages, through product reviews, and even through staff recommendations. It has to be: ‘These are the products we’re stocking. This is why we stock them. And this is why we think that they can improve your life.’”
That kind of storytelling capability is one of the exciting opportunities of the Do it Best ecommerce initiative. And the ability to be nimble, flexible, and accurate with digital information is one of the keys to unlocking the elite-level omni-channel experience that the co-op is bringing its members this summer.
“Having the ability to easily make some changes or add more content, I think, is going to be huge for us,” he adds. “And that's why we're excited with this new initiative coming out from Do it Best. And a huge part of that for us will be getting the correct inventory online so customers can see if the juice is worth the squeeze.” In other words: if it’s worth placing the order or getting in the car.
Jerousek is a proponent of the idea that in the not-too-distant future, the term “ecommerce” itself will fall into obsolescence, if it hasn’t fallen there already. The better term is simply “commerce.”
“The expectation is not, do you have a website,” he says. “Instead it’s: I want to see your inventory. I want to see product suggestions. I want to see reviews. I want to see videos. I want to be able to link that over and purchase everything right there and either pick it up at the store or have it shipped to my address.
“Ecommerce is definitely not a different part of your business. It’s just part of your business now and an investment that everybody needs to make.”
Keeping up with the customers
With 20 Virginia locations, the combined operation of Taylor’s Do it Center and Pleasants Hardware has the scope and scale to experiment with its omnichannel strategy, and it has been doing so for decades as an early adopter of numerous Do it Best initiatives.
But there hasn’t been an initiative like this before.
Coming soon, and what excites Meg Taylor, representing the fourth-generation of the family business, is an ecommerce platform that “we really couldn't have done on our own, or afforded to do on our own.”
The platform formally launches this summer. But key elements of the initiative are already generating excitement for Taylor’s and Pleasants. They include the ability to easily customize the digital storefront, flexibility in offering products outside the Do it Best warehouse, support for content and search engine optimization, seamless shopping with rewards functionality, reviews, videos, and an engine to drive online shoppers into stores.
Many of those elements are not new, but the game changer is the way in which the co-op will shoulder the responsibility for many of the time-consuming and technical aspects of ecommerce.
“Having the resources to be able to do all of this in our business is a significant move as we compete with the big boxes,” Taylor says. “That's why we've been so excited that Do it Best has put such an investment in this area to leverage their efficiencies and create an extremely robust platform.”
At Taylor’s Do it Centers, and more recently Pleasants Hardware, which joined the family business in 2018, convenience has been a major competitive advantage, Taylor adds. And the importance of convenience has grown dramatically during the pandemic, when buy-online-pickup-in-store became a standard operating procedure.
“We're finding that the customer’s journey, whether they complete their purchase online or come into the store, begins online,” says Taylor, who brings a professional background in digital marketing to the family business. “We've been involved in working with Do It Best so closely because we want to make sure that we're meeting our customers where they are.”
Time is money at Foleyhardware.com
In many ways and for many years, Larchmont, New York-based Foley Hardware has served as an example of an aggressively digital, forward-thinking, ecommerce operator. The retailer’s website, Foleyhardware.com, right now is being promoted as a case study in digital-commerce success by one of its technology vendors.
The site has buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) functionality. It has featured products. It has “Homeowner tips and tricks.” Owner John Merrell has put countless hours into developing a winning platform.
But even so, Foleyhardware.com is bracing for a big improvement—the kind that he and like-minded independents feel is crucial to business success in the high-stakes ever-changing realm of ecommerce.
“When competing against Amazon, let’s face it: we’re not going to outspend them on search engine optimization and other things,” Merrell tells HBSDealer. “We’re going to be more local, and we’re going to work to win on a local basis.”
Merrell is eager to roll out Do it Best’s new ecommerce platform that is designed to take over many of the time-consuming requirements of this hyper-competitive digital retail space. What Merrell sees coming down the pike is a seamless and versatile—and easy to manage—omni-channel platform.
“For a lot people, the question is ‘How much time do I have to put into this?,’” Merrell says.
On top of that, customers today have high expectations. They expect shopping sites to perform seamlessly, and he pointed to a giant sporting goods retailer as an example.
“I’m a big Dick’s Sporting Goods fan because my kids play sports,” Merrell says. “I see them as an example [of omni-channel retailing.] I can buy stuff, I can see related items, I can see other items I might be interested in. I can put stuff in my cart and save it. I can then, if I do make a purchase, use my rewards card for my online purchases and in-store purchases.”
That scenario is increasingly the price of entry, even for a single-store retailer.
“And that’s a lot of what we’re working on with our new Do it Best platform,” he says.
Making sure the customer comes to your site and stays on your site requires the kind of time and attention to detail that many independents struggle to support. Supplying content for search engine optimization, coordinating with vendors to maximize visibility, ensuring accurate product descriptions—these tasks are soon to be lifted from the shoulders of the retailer and onto the co-op.
“We get busy, and I don’t have a lot of time to sit at my desk and do the back-end work that needs to be done,” Merrell says. “So, it’s a big thing to have Do it Best doing that for us.”
