The need for an online store is crucial for today’s parts, equipment and attachment sellers in the construction industry. As the push for digitization and remote sales begins to disrupt and take over the marketplace, building customer loyalty online and establishing yourself as an innovator is important now more than ever.
Within the construction and agriculture industries “more than 50% of B2B buyers want to use eCommerce to make purchases (a ‘digital self-serve’ channel), while less than 30% want to interact with a sales rep face-to-face to complete the transaction.” (McKinsey & Company, 2019) This has only been exasperated over the last 7 months during the pandemic.
In today’s digital world, it’s important for parts, equipment and attachments sellers to make products available to customers online seamlessly with all information at their fingertips. The biggest challenge these sellers face is how to create a frictionless experience and getting their branded e-Commerce site up and running quickly, efficiently, and affordably.
To begin, these companies need to start this process by determining whether selling direct or using a white label solution is the right approach.
Sell direct e-Commerce sites are custom built from scratch and often need a lot of manpower to develop and organize. Using the Smart Equip e-Commerce engine with a white label solution offers sellers the ability to “plug and play” their brand and products with an established technology.
White label technology, like SmartEquip e-Commerce, eliminates the need for parts, equipment and attachments sellers to invest in infrastructure or technology to launch an online marketplace, solving three important considerations when companies are deciding whether to white label or sell direct.
To create, maintain and manage a custom site takes time, money and resources. Pricing a sell-direct e-Commerce website not only includes initial web development price, but incorporates costs associated with continued investments in improved functionality, user experience enhancements, and marketing. An upper level budget that includes all of the above can cost up to $350,000 to build. (Jon Jordan, Atlantic BT, 2020)
For most parts, equipment, and attachments sellers, affording a custom-built site is not feasible from a time and budget standpoint. A white label option, like SmartEquip e-Commerce, takes a substantial amount of these factors out of the equation by skipping over initial development costs. In turn, the cost of implementation is significantly lower – approximately 90% less expensive than sell direct.
Developing a custom e-Commerce site to include user experience enhancements can drain internal resources. The biggest challenge within the construction industry is finding the right product support content for ordering parts online.
For 20 years, SmartEquip has been building a network of over 500 OEM brands with a digital product support library to make it easy for technicians to order the right parts for the equipment.
