Classic Car Parts Marketing

I’m often shocked by the discounts and price cuts some catalog and internet retailers hand out like candy. If you’re like most auto parts retailers, you sometimes feel the need to stimulate business, or to match competitor’s price. And at times this is necessary … but make certain you understand the consequences before you act.

While there are lots of valid theories on price-setting, I’m simply going to address this: the effect of giving away a discount.

Quick – you’re thinking of offering a 15% discount. What percent increase in business (in units or orders) must this generate in order to break even?

If your margins are typical, you’ll need to sell at least 50% - 60% more just to bring in the same profit contribution! If this surprises you even a little bit, I’ll show you a simple formula that will apply to your business. (more…)

Technorati Tags: pricing, car parts, profit margin, contribution, discounts, retailing

This morning, my son put me onto a website he found that lets you choose a car model and it returns current offerings on eBaymotors and classifieds (mostly Craigslist) from across the US. I’ve generally found that Craigslist.com is a great place to look for cars, but — until now — you had to search city by city.

In this site, results come back in an easy-to-use list format, complete with a thumbnail photo, the vehicle’s location, description, price (or current bid, for auctions), and a hotlink to the actual ad.

I can’t tell how serious the designer is about maintaining and developing this tool, but for now it’s handy and fun if you’re interested in one of the 30 or so types of car listed. For example, I found 326 models of Alfa Romeo. You can filter your results; typing “84″ in the search box netted me thirteen 1984 Alfa Romeos. At times, you’ll find cars double-listed because the seller has them in more than one Craigslist city.

Check it out foryourself at http://www.jaxed.com/cgi-bin/ms.cgi?.

Poking around the rest of jaxed.com, I found:

1. The fellow is into Corvairs, so he may be weird but can’t be all bad ;-)
2. He’s also developed a free tool that lets you search Craigslist and eBay listings for misspelled items, on the theory that they’re less likely to be found and may sell at bargain prices. It uses a variety of techniques to arrive at misspellings. Try it here.

By the way, should you decide to bid on a car you find through either of these sites, it would be wise — just on general principle – to make sure you’re on the real eBaymotors by typing in the url directly.

Technorati Tags: craigslist, classified ads, ebay, cars, jaxed.com

I’ve been guilty of this in the past. It’s so easy to swipe the product description text from your designer’s Quark or InDesign file and stick it into your website. But consider this: unlike your catalog copy, the text on your site needn’t be constrained by high square-inch costs. You may as well be sure you’re feeding the search engine spiders plenty of relevant keywords.

What you’re doing is a simple but effective bit of search engine optimization. One obvious tactic is to think of all the different names your customers might call a product, and make sure each is sprinkled into the block. For example, a product you call a “clutch release bearing” may be a ”throwout bearing” to some, and they’ll search appropriately. This effort goes hand in hand with buying pay-per-click keywords for that product. Everything else being equal, when your landing page is appropriately rich in the searched keyword(s), your link will show up higher on the search engine’s results page.

Experts in search engine optimization recommend that you figure out (and write down) the best keywords before you start writing copy — and then create the copy around that list.

You don’t need to go overboard; in fact, Google and the other search engines will actually penalize you for “stuffing” or “spamming” keywords into your pages. The worst things you could do would be to try to hide repetitions of certain keywords (using small or background-colored type) or to use keywords that aren’t directly related to the product (e.g. “Paris Hilton wheel bearings”). The search engines definitely won’t reward that kind of behavior. Just make sure each important keyword or phrase is in the copy, and not more than 3 or 4 times. Some have suggested that the optimal “keyword density” is on the order of 5% of the text (in other words, one out of twenty words).

If you’ve done a good job, it won’t be obvious that the copy was keyword-optimized. All copy should remain in your company’s “voice” — and product benefits should shine through.

What if you have thousands of SKUs? Don’t worry about fixing every copy block. Just concentrate on the top 25 sellers or so, and if you have time, do the next 25 and so on.

To dig deeper into search engine optimization, check out Stephan Spencer’s blog. His site appears to be down at this writing, but it’s worth checking out.

Technorati Tags: copy blocks, catalog copy, website copy