Web-savvy sales
Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, BY RICK WEBER
FIVE YEARS AGO, Dan Sabedra, general manager of NBC Truck Equipment in Detroit, started selling parts and accessories for snow- and ice-control equipment on the Internet.
After logging a sales volume of $5,000 the first year, NBC has experienced an increase every year, with a volume of $15,000 in 2005.
Sabedra says the beauty of Internet sales is that there is no geographical limitation on potential customers. NBC has customers as far west as Washington, as far east as Maine, and everywhere in between.
“We've had customers from New England call and say, ‘Holy smokes, I can order that part from you and have it shipped here, and it still costs me less money,’” Sabedra says. “It's good from the standpoint that the whole world is your potential customer.”
That same selling point also can be a detriment.
“It hurts you in some cases,” he says. “Your customers who have bought from you locally for years can do the same thing and come back and say, ‘I can get this out of California or Florida for less money, and still have it shipped for less money.’ That does happen occasionally.
“Anybody who has Internet capability and wants to put snowplow parts online can do it. A lot of people will put it on the Internet and sell it for much less than they'd sell it retail over the counter. Ours are a little less on the Web site than what somebody would pay walking in, because it's a lot less labor intensive. All a distributor has to do is print out the order, pull the parts, and take them to UPS.”
Rick Coolman, director of advertising and communications for Douglas Dynamics — which owns Western, Fisher, and Blizzard — says distributors choose who to sell to and how to sell, and a lot of them are using the Internet. But Western, Fisher, and Blizzard do not really encourage it.
“With snowplows and ice-control equipment, a certain amount of service is required,” he says, “and we'd like to think that the person who buys a snowplow from one of our distributors is in easy access of that distributor should he need service or parts. When a guy buys a snowplow or parts over the Internet, we've lost that touch with a local distributor that can provide him with that service he needs.”
The good news is that virtually all of the Internet sales are parts and accessories — hoses, fittings, couplers, cutting edges, blade guides, shoe assemblies, power angling and lift cylinders, and battery cables and cable controls. Selling and shipping a snowplow is much too cumbersome.
“There's some pretty heavy equipment we ship to distributors — the snowplow, blade, boxes,” Coolman says. “It's certainly not coming via UPS. It's coming on a truck. It has to be unloaded off that truck. I don't picture that happening in someone's driveway.
“But let's even assume that could happen. Now you need to install it. Though there are snowplow contractors out there who have a maintenance department to take care of all the landscape trucks that do install snowplows, we still believe many of the snowplow owners have that plow installed at an authorized dealer. And that's where we think it should be installed — especially with electrical systems getting awfully complicated. Can a user handle the hydraulics and bolt iron to the frame of the truck? How do you get it to someone over the Internet? Does he have the facility and the knowledge to install it? And if he doesn't, there's a problem.”
