Website Closers® presents a shining eCommerce name in the Auto Lighting & Auto Grill Offerings market, with their product roster being comprised of fog lights, headlamps, and grills for a number of different car makes and models, with their fog lights for popular vehicle lines such as Ford, Dodge, and Honda being the brand’s specialty. They offer nearly 480 SKUs on their website, with their products also being available on other online storefronts such as Amazon, Walmart, and eBay.
Rather than being dependent on any one manufacturer, the brand sources their products from multiple trusted suppliers, which also serves to prevent any major interruptions in their inventory process. These products are all sold under their brand name, and seeing that vehicle maintenance and repairs are needed all year, the company enjoys a low risk of seasonality.
Their Average Order Value sits at $99, and though they see strong gross margins for their flagship fog-light products, they have no one SKU that makes up the bulk of their sales, cutting down on concentration risk.
Many of their customers offer glowing praise for the brand’s consistent shipping times and their effective products in a highly evergreen, and highly useful, niche, leading to their steady growth and positive product reviews.
They have sold nearly 20,000 products within the last 3 years, developed a 15% Repeat Order Rate that continues to rise, and, thanks to their excellent customer satisfaction, have come to generate a high rate of word-of-mouth traffic around their brand. This rate is high enough that roughly 55% of their sales are organic, with the rest being traced back to their PPC campaigns.
Their paid advertising plan consists of the following:
- Posts on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook
- Amazon advertising campaigns and coupons
- eBay advertising campaigns
The straightforward nature of their advertising campaign, coupled with their high rate of organic traffic, means that they require little in the ways of ad spend. This also offers a great opportunity for an enterprising buyer to invest resources into improving the campaign, giving them a stronger traffic flow and more potential buyers.
They could start by partnering with affiliates and well-known influencers, running PPC on Google and other frequented locations online, and by establishing an SEO plan on their website and product listings. Additionally, they could further improve their search ranking by creating a blog focused around automobiles and vehicle improvements, appealing to their core demographic and catching the eye of more vehicle enthusiasts.
Though the company does make use of the social media accounts they’ve already constructed, these are currently going underutilized. By posting more actively across their different platforms, as well as creating a more developed social media marketing plan, they could better connect with their customer base and increase their consumer loyalty, which, in turn, would fuel their Repeat Order Rate. Their social media would also be beneficial for announcing new product lines or special events, which could work to promote upsells and cross-sells.
The market that the brand operates out of is thriving, and, as environmental rules and regulations enforced by the government grow stricter and technology become even more advanced, it will likely only continue to grow in size. This puts the company in an excellent place to scale throughout the next few years, and a savvy buyer could make use of it with the various opportunities available to them.
The brand could see an influx in customers simply by adding new SKUs to cover additional top-selling vehicles, as they currently only cover 7 to 8% of the market for cars within the North American market. There’s also plenty of room to target the underserved European market, and supplying new SKUs for this demographic will likely cause a sharp increase in sales.
The buyer could also make the brand more self-sufficient and easier to run by hiring staff to handle some of their responsibilities, as there are no employees outside of the owner for the time being. The owner spends 20 hours per week on the company that are primarily spent checking inventory and preparing shipping, which a proper shipping team could handle. Doing so would significantly cut down on the work that the owner needs to run the business, and give the buyer more time to focus on scaling the brand as they grow.
