actinic case study
orate telecoms solutions
From Lifeboat to Livelihood
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Imagine going
from a monthly turnover of £20,000 to zero in four
weeks. That's what happened to Richard Atkins and his consultancy
business, Orate Telecom Solutions, in April 2001 when the dot-com
bubble burst. Fortunately he had already established an ecommerce
channel (www.orate.co.uk powered
by Actinic Business) selling travellers' international prepaid
SIM cards plus mobile accessories (over 6,000 lines in all) to
companies and consumers based in the UK and across the EU. "The
web store was a lifeboat and kept my business afloat for several
months," says Richard.
Two
years on and web orders still account for over two-thirds of
total turnover, with the stage set for this to rise to 80% with
the implementation of Richard's latest venture. He is offering
his complete online product range to third parties in a 'white
label' format. In other words he brands his catalogue with their
look and feel, and when the end-customer places an order it goes
through to Orate who processes it and answers any queries in
the
name of the third party. A separate merchant account is used
for each site and the third party gets a percentage of every
order.
Richard explains, "The benefit to them is that they get to offer
their customers a wider selection of accessories without the
expense of stocking them - it's a win-win situation for everyone."
Currently Richard provides this badging service to a major low-cost airline who originally wanted to sell his international SIM cards but quickly saw the advantage of offering Orate's full range through their site. He is also in negotiations with a high street mobile chain who want to offer customers things like batteries for older models of phones.
Every version of the catalogue is the same and all Richard has to do to customise each one is modify the colour schemes and design templates. "Making these template changes is incredibly easy as Actinic Business is so flexible. And when there are maintenance updates Actinic's external link feature means I only need to adjust my master database, press F5 and the changes ripple through to all the 'child' sites. It takes seconds."
Another secret of Richard's success at selling online is down to his realisation that psychology plays an important part in shopping. Like the supermarkets, you need to think about how people shop to maximise your conversion of browsers to buyers.
He'd found that with his existing catalogue structure for accessories, some - like batteries - sold like hot cakes while others languished on the 'shelves' on unvisited pages. "So I thought I wouldn't just try to catch up with the supermarkets, but I would go one better. Instead of going up and down every aisle, then having to double back for things that had either been forgotten or suddenly remembered, my virtual supermarket was going to be different. I was going to make my shop totally customer-centric, and in so doing improve my turnover," Richard reveals.
His solution was to set up a section of the shop for each customer containing only the products that would interest them - again an easy thing to do with his ecommerce software. So, instead of having a batteries section and loads of other sections for each product type, Richard has created a section just for Mrs Jones. She is very comfortable with her five year old mobile phone and doesn't want to change it. So right there will be the battery she is looking for, along with the charger. Even a car charger lead in case she has to call out the nice man in his breakdown van, because the one time she needs to use her phone, the battery may be flat. In contrast the area for Mr Smart, the telecoms manager at a medium-sized company, includes special deals on SIM managers and GPS navigation amongst the mundane batteries and headsets.
That's a great idea, but as Richard realised, it's difficult enough keeping records up-to-date when one battery fits seven models of Nokia phones as well as three Philips models. One supplier price change, and you have to remember to update ten products. And worse, these records would now be spread all over the site, instead of in one neat 'batteries' section. It's a potential administration nightmare.
And what about the products like the Radiation Modifier - a low cost product that fits every mobile phone and lab reports show that it removes radiation - that were sitting forlorn on an unvisited 'shelf'. Richard decided to put the Radiation Modifier product in every mobile phone section. That's some 600 different sections, so 600 products in the database. Just imagine making a price or a text change to that lot!
But Richard found a solution that relied on Actinic's non-proprietary, open architecture. Mole End Software offer a replicator program that lets you create a master product which you can clone any number of times. Richard has one master Radiation Modifier in a section that doesn't appear on the web site, and 650 clones in sections that do display. "Make a text or price change in the master, refresh and, hey presto, all of the clones have dutifully mutated in the same way. The add-on saves me 3-4 hours of drudgery every time I update and is error-free - it's brilliant," he explains. "So, now, we have a web shop that is organised as follows: choose the brand of your phone, select the model and you can see all of the products we offer for that make and type of phone.
"And the new store layout proved itself successful immediately. We have gone from a 0.78% conversion to nearly 2.5% which just shows the importance of site design and getting inside your customers' heads. Plus they're putting more items in their shopping baskets too - because they can see what is relevant to them. Instead of buying one item and checking out, our average shopping basket now has several items in it. Maybe we'll have to introduce separate checkouts for less than ten items and one for whole trolley loads!"
Business software used:
Actinic Business
Mole End Actinic
Actinic Product Replicator from Mole End
QuickBooks
Macromedia DreamWeaver/Fireworks
MS Office
