Website Closers® presents an exceptionally well-established eCommerce store that has demonstrated its strengths in multiple ways. That includes growing sales, a product line of more than 100,000 SKUs, and vibrant sales across multiple continents, including Europe, the United States and Asia.
With a highly diverse product line, this company has found an extremely receptive market for its mix of automotive parts and accessories and other SKUs that range from bicycles to jewelry to power grills. What’s truly exceptional about this business is that the success of their eCommerce site is still growing quickly, while the high number of SKUs guarantees those sales will keep expanding.
With nearly two decades of experience in marketing quality products, this company has benefited from a strong SEO program that has boosted organic traffic to their website.
This brand has solid scale opportunities, starting with an expansion of their digital marketing efforts to include a more aggressive social media campaign and a regular email marketing campaign that taps into the company’s massive email database of 65,000+ addresses.
The company could also expand its product catalog to include an unlimited number of new items, since they have numerous drop ship suppliers with strong-selling products that could be added to their marketplace offerings. With revenues already high, these moves could easily triple profits in the short run.
This company was launched in 2004 in Germany to market automotive parts and accessories online. The company’s early success enabled the brand to quickly expand in different ways. One was to diversify the product line to include a host of new items, including bicycles and bicycle parts and accessories, jewelry, fire bowls, barbecue grills, lighting, and pools.
Today about 50% of the brand’s sales come from the original auto parts shop, and the remaining 50% across the newer SKUs.
The brand also diversified its sales platforms. Starting with their own website, the brand also launched onto eBay, which has made up a rising percentage of overall sales.
More recently, the company expanded further onto eCommerce platforms such as
idealo, a German price comparison site; Crowdfox, a similar purchasing and price comparison portal; and Rakuten, a Japanese eCommerce and online retailing company.
Diversity has been a key to this company’s success. With an average order value of $100, the company has a product line that now exceeds 100,000+ SKUs. While sales have remained steady year-round, their expansive variety of products gives this brand a seasonal edge, since they sell more snow chains in the fall and winter months, more block heaters during the winter, and sales of bicycles peak in the spring and summer, as does the sale of pools.
The company has a highly efficient drop ship model for deliveries, which makes up 90% of their orders, with just 10% of shipping coming from stock. Products are sourced directly from manufacturers, and the company keeps a sharp eye on new trends in the market to determine which new products to add to their catalog.
This truly is an international company. While the bulk of the sales (70%) are across Europe, they have a rising percentage of sales in the United States, the UK, and in Asia. Their customer base is highly diverse, ranging from buyers who are 18 right up to age 70. At least 15% of their sales come from repeat customers, and those numbers are rising.
The company has also built up a thriving email database that has more than 65,000+ addresses, while their SEO program and use of keywords in product descriptions has helped to drive organic traffic to their website and eBay page. But there are terrific opportunities to boost their profits significantly.
The company could launch a more assertive social media marketing campaign on a host of social media sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube, while also launching regular email marketing campaigns that target their hefty database for promotions and other notifications. Either approach would significantly boost their customer base.
The company could also launch new PPC campaigns on Google, including the use of a Google AdWords campaign targeting key demographic groups.
Another prime opportunity would be to expand onto other popular eCommerce sites such as Amazon, Walmart or Target and continue to expand their line of SKUs. The brand recently collected agreements from 20 new drop ship suppliers that have products known to be top sellers, and those items could be added to the brand’s catalog.
The current owner now spends 30-40 hours per week running this business, with primary tasks that include forwarding orders to the drop shippers, ordering items to be shipped from their warehouse, researching new products, and handling customer service issues such as answering emails. The company now receives about 5 customer calls a day, and 25 emails. The owner employs two part-time workers, a warehouse packer and an accountant.
No special skills are needed to operate this highly efficient business, outside of general business skills and some knowledge of how to use Excel spreadsheets.
This company has amply demonstrated one of the great strengths of eCommerce sites: giving customers the ability to quickly find exactly what they’re looking for. The fact that this brand now markets more than 100,000 SKUs has enabled them to continue expanding their product line while finding an ever-larger customer base.
That has helped them bring in high and steady revenues, and to get a boost from positive customer feedback and reviews on their website. With a global customer base already in hand, this company has phenomenal opportunities to scale quickly, including through more advanced digital marketing and a further expansion of the product line.
This global success, which has matured after nearly two decades in business, still has immense opportunities to raise profits significantly.
