Relatively speaking, online commerce is a newer phenomenon, dating some 20 years. Entrepreneurs were finding ways to earn a buck through their www vehicles in the mid-1990s, but the dot-com bubble burst of 2001 effectively hit the reset button and saw Amazon—the unofficial king of ecommerce—gradually move forward from books, CDs, videos and computer hardware/software to offer everything under the sun (including, legend has it, uranium ore).
It’s hard to remember the pre-Amazon Prime era, but same (or next) day shipping has set the standard for consumer and business expectations for fulfillment. Amazon is the undisputed model for ecommerce in terms of user experience. But that is largely B2C. In an industry as service and contractually intensive as the office technology space, the biggest players were loath to chase after one-off transactional B2B opportunities.
With tools including MPSToolbox, SSI and, more recently, Keypoint Intelligence’s UVERCE opening a world for dealers to grab transactional and contractual business, a number of dealers find themselves in various stages of ecommerce platform rollouts. Conventional thinking follows that the industry’s larger players dictate the path to adoption, and it is true that many household names have committed to online selling. Realistically, however, the industry probably needs three to five years to determine whether the majority of the dealer sect will follow suit, preferring to let the bleeding-edge players among them test the waters. The same case, perhaps on a smaller scale, could be made for electric vehicle chargers.
While our State of the Industry dealer panel is decidedly pro-ecommerce—after all, the majority of them are still in the honeymoon stage of their platform development—they are not unanimous in their belief that it will grow to become a ubiquitous component of dealer offerings. It’s really a will-they-or-should-they proposition, and the former is the one that bears watching. You can count Tim Renegar, the president of Kelly Office Solutions in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as among the skeptical when it comes to widespread adoption.
“I think most dealers will never go there,” Renegar said. “I think [adopters] need to be a pretty significant size. The young entrepreneurs that jump in will really commoditize the market. Many of the bigger dealers, the Marcos, RJ Youngs and Novatechs, are already deeply looking into it or have adopted it. The same goes for many manufacturers. But in my opinion, I don’t see this being adopted by the vast majority of the BTA channel. And that gives us a big leg up in our markets.”
Tight Fraternity
Given the widespread growth driven by UVERCE adoption in the past year alone, Woodhull LLC Vice President of Business Development Robert Woodhull believes the proliferation will continue, given the tight network of dealers and the opportunity to learn more about ecommerce through peer group/association interactions.
“It’s just like anything else; when something catches speed in our industry, everybody adopts it,” Woodhull said. “There are a few unique players in that space who are adopting it, and those people usually are all like-minded dealers that are already communicating, anyway.”
Cost considerations will play a role, especially among the smaller dealers, notes Sam Stone, president of Stone’s Office Equipment in Richmond, Virginia. He points out that a $1 million dealership would be hard-pressed to justify a $20,000-$30,000 commitment for an ecommerce platform. Another factor that will mitigate widespread adoption is the prevalence of older owners in their 60s and 70s who are reluctant to “rock the boat” at this stage of their careers. Others, he added, are simply averse to including pricing on their websites, even though most dealers have a good idea about their competition’s price points on many popular models.
Dealer Personas
“When you weed out the ones who don’t want to put pricing out there—those whose thinking is a little bit older—and the dealers that can’t afford it, I can see 40-50% of dealers having [ecommerce],” Stone said. “The POAs, the Marcos and GFCs can do it, and I think we’ll see about 40% of the independents getting on board in the next couple years. As these platforms become more refined and the pricing hopefully comes down, perhaps we’ll see more easily accessible features.”
There will be ramifications as OEMs enter the fray on a direct basis, and as the offering reaches its tipping point from a scale perspective, the question is how will the early adopters adjust? “It’ll be interesting to watch which manufacturers will be the brave ones to make that move. But once everybody has a site, then what does that mean to the dealer?” he added.
One dealer who has no doubt that ecommerce is the wave of the future is Chip Miceli, CEO of Pulse Technology in Schaumburg, Illinois. The holdouts, he says, will find themselves in an unenviable position from a competitive standpoint.
“Ecommerce will continue to be an important part of our industry, and even more so in the years ahead,” he said. “Any business that does not adopt ecommerce will find itself on the outside looking in.”
