Randi Barshack, VP of Worldwide Marketing, Mercado
If you believe that for every product there is a person out there just waiting to buy it, than you might just want to look at ways to replicate your site and take your successful eCommerce model out there further into the vast Web. So, what does this mean? Since the dawn of eCommerce we’ve seen successful examples of niche products being sold by “Webpreneurs”, but prior to serious Web marketing of late, it’s been rather hit or miss for retailers trying to penetrate a market and actually connect with those shoppers who would be inclined to purchase specialty items like bowling shirts, pricey hand-carved toys and organic treat baskets. We now know that – armed with the knowledge of how to gain more organic traffic – anyone with something to sell stands a great chance of making a go of it on the Web (and quitting their day jobs).
But why stop there? The current trend we’re seeing is the adoption of a multi-store strategy. It’s not an overly complicated strategy, but an ambitious one that can be best articulated as a “copy and paste” approach, as the folks at PlumberSurplus.com put it. They’ve developed a marketing platform that, simply put, works great – and are starting to replicate that experience, right down to homepage layout, in other verticals. Other retailers are looking at the long tail as an opportunity to go where no other online retailers have dared to go, and are reaping the rewards. New Jersey-based S&A industries has identified several unique market opportunities and continues to roll out sites like KarateDepot.com and ScrubsGallery.com – offering products that have a darn decent shopper/product match rate (aka high converters) because of the specialized nature of a karate uniform (also known as a “gi”), for example.
In fact, most of the online retailers we work with tell us that the terms that convert best for them are the more specific ones that most closely match their business’s core competency (e.g. pale yellow organic cotton layette) rather than more generic – and often more expensive – catch-all search terms that yield the shopper too many results to deal with anyway. This really comes as no surprise, but even with great SEO it can be challenging to capture enough traffic, in such a crowded and noisy selling environment, to thrive online. These long tail terms represent new business opportunities for nimble online businesses when properly identified and turned into Web stores that leverage a nimble site technologies – typically SaaS (software as a service) solutions.
This strategy can also be effectively employed by retailers who want to do a better job of penetrating within their category. These are not typically major retailing brands, but instead are the pure-play eCommerce concerns that today, through effective search marketing, are making a profitable business of selling products that meet the very specific needs of shoppers who are turning to the Web to find that hard-to-find item. Just how are these retailers accomplishing this? It starts with knowing what their shoppers want, then taking that knowledge and making sure everybody knows you have what they’re looking for. As a retailer you need to tell yourself you’re not willing to miss out on a single opportunity.
This is the attitude Cymax Stores, a Canadian pure-play home furnishings retailer, has adopted. The Cymax approach is to select new product lines and launch new sites based on the identification of popular searches on their sites. Once their team settles on a new product line – for example, curio cabinets, it takes Cymax about a month to design and develop a new site (like MoreCurioCabinets.com). By having several teams working simultaneously on new sites, they are able to launch a new niche site every two weeks on average. Using an approach like this makes it easy for online retailers to quickly expand their Web footprint and aggressively capture more share of the business done in their category. This nimble company is predicting that over 200 sites will be up and running by the end of this year, and forecast an increase in sales of 40% over 2007 – from $32.5 million to over $47 million!
Whether we’re talking about SMB or larger pure-play Internet retailers like Cymax, I expect the copy/paste trend to only continue. For businesses with a significant dependency on search-driven revenue it just makes a load of sense. But, the long tail of online retailing is a thick one, meaning that a lot of consolidation is likely to occur over the next couple of years. More and more successful specialty online retailers are going to look attractive to larger online businesses looking to expand into other markets and increase incremental revenue. For these retailers, the key to expanding effectively is to ensure that don’t fall into the trap of supporting multiple site infrastructures, and that they can easily employ cross-store merchandising. In this regard, retailers need to take mercy on their merchandisers by giving them tools that allow them to leverage their work across brands and sites, rather than duplicate and waste effort re-inventing the campaign wheel for each online store.
