West Marine steers customer acquisitions through Google and eBay

With its web site traffic from search engines and its sales conversion rates at all-time highs, boating supplies retailer West Marine attributes much of its growth to a new search-engine optimization strategy that relies on static category pages, Tony Gasparich, vice president of direct sales, tells InternetRetailer.com.

Because many of WestMarine.com’s pages are dynamic, with image and content links to back-end databases, the retailer was having trouble getting its pages captured and indexed by search engine Google Inc.’s web crawlers, Gasparich says. “It was hard to get them to find us,” he says.

So West Marine created static product category pages that are easy for web crawlers to find. Now when shoppers search Google for boating supplies, they find West Marine’s category pages, then link to its dynamic product pages, he says. “We’re maintaining significantly more qualified traffic,” he says.

West Marine is also getting a surprising increase in customers through eBay.com, where it sells end-of-lifecycle products at discount prices. “It’s a great way to move products at the end of their lifecycle, but the main reason we sell on eBay is to get new customers,” Gasparich says. “Over half of our eBay customers shop with us at regular prices.”

West Marine, which operates a catalog and more than 300 stores, also has increased sales through a loyalty program that provides visibility into the different channels used by individual shoppers and lets it design more targeted e-mail marketing campaigns based on how customers prefer to shop, Gasparich says. "As a result, we`re seeing higher retention with customers that we might have overlooked in a one-channel marketing effort," he says.