I have an e-commerce web site where my company manufactures and sells aftermarket automotive products.
We sell direct to the consumer and we also have dealers who sell product on our behalf. The split is about 50/50.
Dealers in this industry come and go and for the most part, don't actively promote on our behalf. They will just put our product up on their web site, and if someone buys it from them, then they will place an order with us - then we drop ship it to their consumer. When we call them to ask why there aren't more sales, their response is "it's up on my site, people just aren't ordering it."
When consumers buy from us directly, they will often ask for a price break for buying a lot of products at a time, so we will usually give them some sort of discount - 5% to 15%.
Then these consumers go back and tell the dealers about this discount (probably to see if the dealer is willing to offer the same price). This gets the dealers angry with us because we are undercutting them.
These dealers sometimes buy from us just a few hundred dollars three times a year -- hardly enough to justify us changing policy for their benefit.
But is there any better way to handle this situation? In the ideal situation, we would have such a strong dealer network that we would not have to sell direct to consumer, but we are not yet at that level. We can't rely on these dealers to sell our product. As I said, they will rarely go out of their way to promote our product, even though it is a differentiated, better product than the competition.
Any ideas?
We sell direct to the consumer and we also have dealers who sell product on our behalf. The split is about 50/50.
Dealers in this industry come and go and for the most part, don't actively promote on our behalf. They will just put our product up on their web site, and if someone buys it from them, then they will place an order with us - then we drop ship it to their consumer. When we call them to ask why there aren't more sales, their response is "it's up on my site, people just aren't ordering it."
When consumers buy from us directly, they will often ask for a price break for buying a lot of products at a time, so we will usually give them some sort of discount - 5% to 15%.
Then these consumers go back and tell the dealers about this discount (probably to see if the dealer is willing to offer the same price). This gets the dealers angry with us because we are undercutting them.
These dealers sometimes buy from us just a few hundred dollars three times a year -- hardly enough to justify us changing policy for their benefit.
But is there any better way to handle this situation? In the ideal situation, we would have such a strong dealer network that we would not have to sell direct to consumer, but we are not yet at that level. We can't rely on these dealers to sell our product. As I said, they will rarely go out of their way to promote our product, even though it is a differentiated, better product than the competition.
Any ideas?
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