Manufacturing Sites Best Practices
Manufacturers these days are thinking about how they can go direct to consumer online while still remaining loyal to their tried-and-true channels. Some are actually selling direct to consumer and fulfilling in different manners (e.g. from a warehouse, dealer/distributor networks, and in-store pick up.)
Since researching and finding product information is the #1 goal of visitors, it’s to your advantage to update your content and functionality available on your ecommerce platform. Manufacturers should have comprehensive and SEO-friendly product descriptions with images, videos, and specification documents to ensure the user experience is not disorganized and busy.
They can also take advantage of social media integration, customer reviews, comparison tools, advance sorting features, custom configurators, and strong site search function — all features available on Magento Enterprise, and all features that are becoming necessary to maintaining conversion rates as other sites get more and more robust.
When the manufacturer does not sell direct to consumer online, a well-designed (and functional) dealer and store locator is essential to driving sales to the channel. We also suggest using peer-to-peer inventory status, so customers know exactly where they can buy the item they are researching (e.g. online partners, in-store, distributors, dealers). Keeping that path to purchase easy and efficient will have an enormous impact on site usability. To see this in action, check out prAna, a site Gorilla recently built, where we implemented P2P inventory look-up to maintain channel harmony.
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