Finding omnichannel solutions

As omnichannel becomes the norm for today’s customers and retailers, solutions that enable IBD to compete for business on the internet are needed. The challenge, for many IDBs, is the perception of what is required to do this successfully: Skills, budget, time, and resources – all in short supply for staff working in a customer-facing brick-and-mortar environment. How can a local bike shop compete with online giants, and win new customers? Simon Cox talks with Andrew Richardson of Avelon Network to find out.

Andrew, can you share a little of your background, to give readers some insight into your cycling industry experience?

Sure. I’ve ridden bikes as a journalist and for results, which also means I’ve worked in local bike shops, for national-level retailers, and for a global bike brand.

My desk-based work focused on writing copy and creating digital content, then progressed into campaign management.

I’ve been involved in setting up and establishing a digital agency, then co-founded an award-winning, sport-specific, affiliate platform which looks to put businesses and brands back in control of their online sales generation efforts.

Can a single-store, owner-run, business make modern online marketing work for it, genuinely driving clearly attributable sales?

Short answer: Yes. Getting into a little more detail, if your store has a good web presence, and by that I mean a website that’s on say, Citrus-Lime, Push Retail, or Shopify (we work with a host of others as well) then we definitely can make attributable sales work for your business, significantly improving the value you generate from your online presence.

Does this take IT and digital marketing skills to set up and maintain?

Short answer: No. Longer answer: Definitely not. The solution is designed to integrate seamlessly into a shop’s web system. We designed the service in a way that sees us take care of all of this for our partners. Depending on the web system, this could take only a few seconds to set up. The maintenance of your program is also automated, so you don’t have to worry about much.

You mentioned that what you deliver with Avelon is called ‘affiliate marketing’ – doesn’t that require relationships with publishers – the BikeRadar and Cycling News of this world – to work?

Yes. We’ve already got these in place, and enable our retailers to have direct conversations with the media outlets via a chat or messaging function within the Avelon platform.

Building these relationships is a critical part, which makes it possible for a single, owner-run, shop to make this a financially rewarding and successful means to generate new and repeat sales.

Affiliate marketing, in practice, is really easy. An affiliate promotes your product and if a sale comes off the back of their advertising efforts, then they earn a commission.

These efforts are predominately reviews, buyers guides etc – and links are placed on these articles automatically, depending on price, stock and commission.

You make it easy to see what has driven a sale? Which makes it clear what making the sale cost?

Yes, and Yes. We track exactly where sales come from and provide this information with an easy-to-use and very understandable web-based dashboard.

We don’t run a last-click attribution model, instead building out a split attribution which is much fairer for the publisher. What this means is when we can see that a customer has visited your site via 3 or 4 different locations – articles on different websites – we then share the commission across those sites, rather than just rewarding the last location which resulted directly in the conversion.

Critical to highlight here: We purposefully don’t work with discount code websites for this reason, as we want to drive as many close to full RRP sales as possible.

We see this as a better, more reflective, more rewarding, model. It’s rare (but can happen in specific situations) that only one source drives a sale, or generates an immediate conversion.

Cost is also something we are totally transparent about. Subscribers know exactly what they are paying for our services.

Are you paying for a service and then paying additional for listings?

Our subscription costs £49 per month and gets you access to everything on the platform. Listings are free and you just pay the commission once a sale is confirmed.

We make the whole process incredibly simple and unlike Google Shopping, there’s no cost per click payment required upfront. You only pay a commission if a sale is confirmed.

As an example, for a smaller business, you will likely find they list 10 or 20 products, whereas the likes of Sigma Sports will have 10,000 + items listed. We have a smaller business that, with this approach, is seeing 10 bike sales a month with zero in-store team time or effort.

How does a business decide what prices it sells at? Are single stores competing on price with big national retailers?

The price and commission percentage you reward the publisher with is totally up to you. We automatically fill the price on listings from your stock feed and it updates every 60 seconds, so if you decide to have a sale on a specific product whereby the price is the best on the internet, the listing will update in a matter of minutes.

It’s a great way to clear through stock without giving your money to Google. It does give smaller stores the ability to compete with big national retailers without any upfront risk, but also affiliate marketing is hugely reliant on the relationship with the publisher, which we take care of.

Some publishers don’t want to prioritise a national retailer on their listings, as they offer deep discounts but low commission rates.

Is it possible to make this work on a regional level, focusing on local areas, or is it most effective with a nationwide reach enabled?

It’s more effective with a nationwide reach, but smaller stores can definitely see a return if they work within the local area. We do have the ability to geographically target users on publisher sites, but we recommend diving into nationwide shipping – especially if you’re looking to clear through stock.