Ben Argov, co-owner of high-end wine cabinet and wine cooler manufacturer Le Cache, talks about the impact new technology has had on sales and on his e-commerce sites
Q What changes was Le Cache going through before migrating the company’s business technology to Netsuite, a Web-based e-commerce software company?
A We were operating two e-commerce sites that primarily handled high-dollar, low-value transactions, and launching a third site that had the opposite transaction model. We weren’t set up to manage that kind of order flow, fulfillment and billing, or to communicate with our customers and leads to close sales. We started exploring alternatives to our custom sites. What attracted us to Netsuite was the ability to be integrated.
The amount of time it took to complete a transaction before Netsuite was five to six minutes; now it’s about 15 seconds.
Q Are you measuring the difference in conversations you’re having since using the new software?
A For our high-dollar, low-volume business, we sell through third parties, as well as direct to consumer. Direct sales have gone up from 20% of overall sales to 50%. They’re up because we can track where customers abandoned their cart.
We can send an e-mail to find out why, and then pick up those marginal sales. We also couldn’t give a discount or free shipping on the fl y, but now we can give a code to the customer and he can process the order on his own instantly, rather than have us add discounts on the back end.
Q How are you using acquired data for retention?
A We’re using our latest site as the testing ground for campaigns now. Sending e-mail blasts and postcards to members of our database has been very effective. We could have sent the postcards before, but we couldn’t have tracked the success or ROI. Now we can attach a promo code to the piece and track to see where people are coming from.
Q What impact has the transition had on third-party sales?
A We were using a lot of shopping sites and they were expensive. We can now create campaigns specifically for each one and see who is sending traffic our way and which referrals are resulting in sales. We actually stopped using Pricegrabber because they weren’t sending any traffic; and then Shopzilla because it was sending clicks but we weren’t getting many sales
