Manufacturers’ web visitors are motivated buyers, says Channel Intelligence
While the typical sales conversion rate for retail web sites is about 2%, retailers are realizing rates 4 to 10 times as large for shoppers linked from manufacturers’ web sites, Channel Intelligence Inc. reports. “Our retailers are seeing conversion rates of 8% to 20%,” says president Alan Fulmer.
Channel Intelligence provides a connection service to 70 manufacturers, including Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp., that links their web sites directly to the e-commerce sites of preferred retailers. About 180 retailers participate.
Channel Intelligence, which introduced its service a year ago, says most of its client manufacturers had previously forwarded online consumers to the web sites of large retailers known to carry their products. “But shoppers then had to find the product they wanted, then see if it was in stock,” Fulmer says.
Under the Channel Intelligence system, shoppers on a participating manufacturer’s site can click on a product link to call up a list of retailers showing each merchant’s retail price and inventory status, then click on one of these retailers to go right to the buy page for the sought-after product.
In addition to the ease of getting to a buy page in two clicks from the manufacturer’s site, Fulmer attributes the high conversion rate to the fact that consumers shopping on a manufacturer’s site often know exactly what they want. Moreover, a study conducted for Channel Intelligence this year by Frank Lynn & Associates found that 34% of consumers who visited a manufacturer’s web site eventually made a purchase; of this group, 27% bought online, 7% bought offline.
Back...
