Improving Sales and Profits using eCommerce

 

As businesses strive to enhance their profitability, we’ve uncovered numerous avenues for harnessing eCommerce to meet financial goals.

 

For example, a garage door company started their eCommerce business just over 20 years ago. The site had minimal maintenance to keep it running but did not invest in new technology. Seeking to improve their operational efficiency and improve accuracy and customer order placement the company decided to invest in a new eCommerce platform.

 

One of the main components of a garage door is the torsion spring. This is the mechanism the actually lifts and lowers your automatic garage door. Torsion springs orders total $210 million annually. Based on different materials, weight and dimensions, there are millions of permutations and combinations for garage doors. Orders had to be taken manually by a sales representative to capture the information required to build a torsion spring.

 

A menu was installed on the site for the customer to select the options required for their personalized garage door. A configurator was installed on the back end and integrated with their ERP to take the customer selections and build a door in the correct proportions to operate properly.

 

In this example, the company was spending $65,000 per customer service person and employed 270 in this role. The company invested $400,000 for the configurator and was able to reduce their customer service team by half to a team of 130. This saved the company $8.5 million in payroll expense. In addition, the garage door experienced a significant reduction in errors enabling their 4,000 dealer / distributors to deliver better customer service.

 

The most integral part of your business is to improve your ROI. Looking at your current manual business processes takes time and diligence. Check your online store and optimize your processes to save money while delivering world class customer service.