Inside Do it Best’s e-commerce initiative
Back in March at the Do it Best Spring Market in Orlando, the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based co-op unveiled a plan to reshape its role as a partner in the e-commerce strategy of its members.
Among the highlights of the plan:
• The new strategy will feature member microsites integrated with Doitbest.com. Members will have the option of controlling their home page and promoting unique merchandise, but Do it Best intends to handle critical tasks including design, analytics, marketing and search-engine-optimization.
• Profit from ship-to-home product sales at Doitbest.com will go to the nearest participating store even if that store had nothing to do with the sale.
• Same-day in store pick-up is one of the motivating concepts behind the new system.
• Do it Best Corp. is removing cost to entry to participate in the e-commerce program. Gone are the set-up fees and monthly maintenance fees. Members will be charged a fee based on the volume of sales through the site.
In recent interviews with HBSDealer (see above), leaders of the initiative shared more ideas behind the plan. Vice President of Ecommerce Allison Flatjord explained one of the concepts behind the co-op’s plan to take a more active role in helping dealers run their e-commerce operations: “Doing e-commerce on your own is a really heavy lift,” she said.
“Many years ago, you could just kind of put up a web site, put products on it and do pretty well,” she added. “Now there are things like Google algorithms and SEO and different ways to merchandise and market that have become so complex, it really wasn’t a task that our members wanted to take on.”
Corbin Prows, Do it Best Ecommerce Development manager said: “As the pandemic hit, it became a situation [where] the speed of evolution just multiplied. It’s time to take a drastic-approach change—not only from a strategy perspective, but also in the platform and processes to support that strategy.”
Learn more about the Do it Best initiative in the video above.
