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Posted: Sat, October 19, 2002
ITW Interview: Phil Tucker, Buy Electrical Direct Buy Electrical Direct is one of the UK's major ecommerce sites with over 100,000 unique visitors every month and a multi-million annual turnover. Yet it's built upon a modest, family-owned electrical retailer based in West Wales that has traded for over 50 years. Sales Director, Phil Tucker, tells us how ecommerce transformed a rural business. When you first came to develop BE-Direct, what were your aims for the site? To simply use it to add another potential area of business to what we already did. Your first attempt at the website failed. Why do you think this happened, and what did you learn from the experience? We relied on the `so called' experts who in fact understood nothing about our business and industry worked. It taught us to use the very in depth trade knowledge that we have and just use the web as a means of attracting more customers from a wider audience. Do you devote much time to site development? Yes, we continually spend time updating our site and developing new ideas and functionality. We now employ a full time web administrator who spends all day every day updating the products we sell and their prices. We also revamp our site a couple of times a year with a major overhaul of the back end programming etc as required. As a fairly rural business, do you think that the Internet has benefited you in particular? Unbelievably so. How do you get so many people to your site? We make sure that our site can be found on the search engines. We partner with other companies such as BT and Pinnacle insurance. We use imaginative and cost-effective marketing techniques that cost us very little. We do not pay to advertise in directories either on- or offline or throw money at driving traffic. Do schemes such as i-ponts work when it comes to getting people to shop online? They have their uses but should not be thought of as something that used alone will bring business. Our focus first and foremost is based around giving our customers great deals but more importantly the best service of any online electrical retailer - and we have achieved this. Why do you think BE Direct website so successful at what it does? We put the customer first every time. What advice would you give to someone just starting an ecommerce operation? Unless you are willing to invest plenty of time and effort then don't bother starting one at all. If you are prepared to make the investment then make sure that you deliver to your audience whatever promises that you make. If you don't then you will be found out very quickly and easily. Where do you see BE Direct going in the future? We will get bigger and better and as long as we stay true to our core values of top quality service the future looks very rosy. Besides BE Direct, what's your favourite ecommerce site, and why? I use Lastminute. It is slow and frustrating to use but it does deliver to me the ability to book hotels fairly easily and very cheaply in comparison to the prices that I used to pay. Check out the Buy Electrical Direct website at www.be-direct.co.uk |
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