It is no secret that a consumer’s journey to making a purchase is convoluted. The advent of online shopping, social networking and the availability of more information than ever before has created better informed and somewhat hard to predict buyers. In an October 2016 Thinking with Google article—titled 7 ways to win consumers on their path to purchase—the author states that the path to purchase is rarely linear and more akin to a scavenger hunt. To be successful today, a business must find ways to make sure they are found and captured in that hunt.
To get into the game you have to be ready to play and there are hundreds of books, articles, blog entries and white papers that provide insight into content, page design, search engine optimization, customer engagement, advertising and transaction management strategies that can help lay a foundation for your ecommerce initiatives. Not getting these things right will definitely hamper your success rate.
Oddly enough, however, those fundamentals are not what trips up consumers when they are making purchases online. Steven Noble, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, stated that a consumer passes through four lifecycle phases on their path to purchase: Discover, Explore, Buy and Engage. Historically, online and instore experiences—Discover and Explore—are positive and helpful in steering consumers to a buying decision.
It is at the Buy phase that eCommerce and instore purchases stall. In-store a consumer may fail to pull the trigger on a purchase because of price, experience with sales person, product availability and host of other reasons. Online that failure to commit is recorded as an abandoned cart and it is a significant problem for ecommerce stores. In his January 2019 article on Barilliance.com, Stephan Serrano states that the average online store loses over 75 percent of their sales to cart abandonment.
Why are we able to get them to the gate but trip them up at the finish?
The reasons are plenty but center on transparency. Research by Statista and Baymard cite shipping and other unexpected costs along with the need to set up a user account as the primary motivators for not completing transactions. In the Barymard study of 1,799 U.S. adults in 2017, 60 percent of the respondents said they abandoned a cart because the extra costs associated with shipping, tax and fees were too high.
Imagine if you could claw back some of that 60 percent, not to mention the other 22 percent we leave at the alter because we want them to set up user accounts. Seamless, painless and easy to execute transactions can close more business. Buy-as-a-guest is a popular solution and offering free shipping can certainly help. However, tight profit margins can make free shipping services unaffordable for some businesses.
Keystone Automotive’s Parts Via sales network provides an innovative solution that tackles these issues head on. Parts Via connects brick and mortar retailers to supplier sites and the consumers looking to buy online. A simple Buy Now button inserted on the supplier’s site allows the consumer to purchase at the peak of their exploration process and choose to have their product shipped-to-home or shipped-to-store. Whatever shipping option is selected the retailer and the supplier benefit from the transaction.
The simplicity of the transaction process—no user account required—keeps consumers engaged and the free shipping, ship-to-store option delivers two distinct benefits. It gives the consumer what they are looking for (free shipping) and it provides traffic to the brick and mortar business allowing them to add to the original purchase and offer installation and other services. The Parts Via Network currently supports multiple supplier partners and 2,000-plus dealer members and many additional partners and dealers are coming online daily.
Keystone recently previewed its new consumer website partsvia.com during its annual BIG show in Dallas, as part of the program’s Phase II rollout. The site will complement the Buy Now functionality on supplier sites and have the added benefit of hosting all the Parts Via supplier’s products in one location. The new site will include a robust parts look-up tool, fresh content and ship-to-store and ship-to-home options. A new appointment scheduling feature, allowing Parts Via dealers to promote available installation times, will be added soon.
Keystone has also launched its Parts Via Amazon Marketplace store. This storefront will sell products under the Parts Via banner and generate similar benefits for the member Network Dealers, where every transaction, a portion of the sale is shared with a Parts Via Network Dealer. The storefront’s current 2,661 SKUS are made up of high-volume MAP brands that help maintain margins throughout the supply chain.
A new loyalty program is also available to Parts Via network members. The new loyalty program employs a tiered approach to participation that makes getting involved easy and scalable for future growth regardless of a business’s size, focus or markets served. As a Parts Via Network Dealer’s participation and engagement with Keystone grows so to do the benefits of being in the Parts Via Loyalty Program.
