Specialty/Non-Apparel

Guide to E-Commerce Technology

Internet Retailer Best of the Web 2007

AppliancePartsPros.com
Backcountry.com
BassProShops.com
Bodybuilding.com
DoverSaddlery.com
DrsFosterSmith.com
JCWhitney.com
Moosejaw.com
NFLShop.com
Petco.com
Dog.com (PetsUnited)
SportsmansGuide.com

As the Internet draws out innovation in retailing, providing a business case for serving myriad niches, some of the more interesting and unusual consumer web sites will be found among non-apparel specialty merchants. Take AppliancePartsPros.com, which made Internet Retailer’s Top 50 Best of the Web list this year for its ability to use the web to serve a consumer need that would be difficult to serve offline.

Looking for a door gasket for your refrigerator or a blower wheel for your electric dryer? Going without such obscure items could mean days of spoiled food and backed-up laundry, yet getting your hands on replacements quickly could be a long shot. But with an extensive parts database served by effective site search and navigation functions, AppliancePartsPros.com has made finding such things an easy affair.

The Specialty/Non-Apparel section this year also includes seven retail sites in a sports/activities category, three that focus on pets and one that caters to car and truck owners. One thing they all have in common is a knack for providing a shopping experience that engages their customers and keeps them coming back.

Bodybuilding.com extends its reach with shoppers by letting them download videos of a personal trainer to an iPod; Backcountry.com launched this year “fall-through” search, which automatically sends shoppers to one of Backcountry’s sister sites when a searched-for product is not available at the site the shopper is viewing; and fishing and hunting site BassProShops.com shows shoppers how to cook ‘em as well as how to catch ‘em.

Taking the usefulness of web shopping for a long ride, JC Whitney lets shoppers search or navigate by hundreds of brands and types of parts, or dive into a specialty area like classic VWs. NFLShop.com lets football fans pull down a menu for men’s, women’s and kids’ products to shop at any NFL team.

The multiple pet sites of PetsUnited, meanwhile, benefit from traffic-generating features like Forum.Dog.com, a discussion site that channels comments from about 15,000 animal lovers every day.

Such entertaining and informative features keep Top 50 e-retailers the top dogs in their fields.

Working behind the counter as an inventory specialist and as a repair technician gave Roman Kagan the know-how to launch Appliancepartspros.com, a small e-commerce site that’s making a bigger name for itself in the online hardware and home improvement space.

In the last year the company’s web sales have grown by 50% to $4.9 million while monthly site traffic has doubled to 150,000 unique visitors. Appliancepartspros.com is building a bigger web business and a loyal audience of do-it-yourself shoppers because the site helps customers locate hard-to-find parts. “I started this because I wanted my own business and I knew the Internet could help people locate scarce parts faster than driving around town to different parts stores or spending all morning on the phone,” Kagan says.

Appliancepartspros.com enables customers to find both current and hard-to-find parts for appliances—usually within four clicks. The online retailer stocks parts for about 100 makes and models and maintains an online inventory of more than 1 million parts. “We have parts for appliances that date pretty far back,” Kagan says. “We maintain some inventory for stoves built in the 1950s.”

Kagan, a self-taught e-commerce manager and web developer, built Appliancepartspros.com so that customers can search for spare or replacement parts by model number, manufacturer and by type of part. The site’s design is simple and straightforward, but what really sets Appliancepartspros.com apart from similar sites is deep content. Appliancepartspros.com maintains a digital library of 300,000 schematics for specific appliances. Users can click on a particular part and see a schematic of where the part fits on a washing machine motor or an oven broiler igniter.

Appliancepartspros.com also offers a live chat tool to help customers navigate the site or find a specific part as they look at images of washer motors, broiler parts and refrigerator pumps. “Buying appliance parts isn’t exactly a fun task, so making a site for appliance parts easy to use is key,” says Shari Altman, president of direct marketing and e-commerce consulting firm Altman Dedicated Direct Inc. “Appliancepartspros.com also does their homework in terms of removing barriers to purchasing.”

One has to hand it to the guys at Backcountry.com: They’re never short on ideas. The group that mastered the niche strategy—they began setting up microsites for various subsets of outdoor enthusiasts in 2004—are continuing to innovate.

Earlier this year the outdoor gear specialist introduced so-called fall-through search at its site. The feature, built by WebSideStory at the company’s request, delivers searchers to other Backcountry sites when they’ve searched for an item Backcountry.com doesn’t carry but its other niche sites do.

Backcountry doesn’t cross-market across its sites because “we think there’s a lot of power in having separate brands,” says John Bresee, president. “On the other hand, when a customer is looking for something and we know that we have it, to not offer it to them is not good customer service.”

Fall-through search preserves the separate identities of the specialized niche sites while directing the customer to the site carrying the product. “It’s been a powerful revenue driver across all sites,” Bresee says.

Fall-through search “is a great idea, but it needs some work,” contends Maris Daugherty, senior consultant at J.C. Williams Group. She notes that it may confuse some customers because while they’re told they’re being forwarded to a different site, they still appear to be on Backcountry.com.

Backcountry in August also introduced the “Bottomless SaC” at its SteepandCheap.com site, where bargain hunters can get deeply discounted prices on “killer gear.” Originally, Backcountry posted one deal at midnight each day, “but the site was getting so much traffic that we were selling out at 1 a.m.,” Bresee says. “We had 23 hours of dead air some days.”

Now, a new item is posted on the site as soon as another deal sells out. “When we went to the Bottomless SaC, our traffic and revenue doubled without any advertising,” Bresee says.

Buoyed by the success of the Bottomless SaC, Backcountry in October introduced a desktop alert system that notifies customers when a new deal has been posted on SteepandCheap.com. “We’ve just had tens of thousands of people downloading that,” Bresee says. “It paid for itself the first day.”

Sometimes, submerged treasure is right under one’s nose. BassProShops.com already had in place an extensive outdoor living library—content geared toward the outdoors enthusiasts who are its core customers—but not enough customers were finding it. Bass Pro repositioned links to its library on a prominent piece of home page real estate, rotated featured material in that spot, and carved out a corner on product pages to feature relevant new additions to library content.

Since then traffic to the outdoors library has increased and so, correspondingly, have sales. “The people that use the outdoors library visit our site twice as frequently as other customers, and they have a higher lifetime value than others,” says David Seifert, director of operations, direct marketing.

That’s just one part of Bass Pro’s renewed focus this year on community building and putting the customer at the center of its web efforts—even when those site visitors aren’t in shopping mode. And those results are just one illustration of how the larger effort is paying off.

“There seems to have been a reluctance with retailers to really expose customers to that kind of content because there was a fear it would interfere with the shopping process,” says Seifert. “If you’re just an online store, that’s fine for when people want to buy something. But if you want to try and catch someone when they aren’t going to buy something, you have to give them a lot of other reasons to come to the site.”

BassPro also added customer ratings and review this year. A home page link to “top-rated hunting gear” proved to be the most successful online promotion ever run on the site, lifting conversions on featured products by 59% for shoppers who read the reviews vs. those that didn’t.

Lauren Freeman, president of The e-Tailing Group, gives BassProShops.com thumbs up on how the site demonstrates a deep understanding of its core enthusiast audience. “The robustness of their library, their forums—it all speaks to the community aspect,” she says. “Some of the things they are doing that underlie who their audience is are really impressive.”

Bodybuilding.com has a strong customer base in more ways than one. The site has pulled off the content-community-commerce combo that many retailers dream of, and in a mere six years has grown from two guys in a garage to a company with $46 million in annual revenue, 114 employees and a steadily growing need for more warehouse space. And it’s been profitable since Day One, says CEO Ryan DeLuca, a self-described computer geek who started doing Internet marketing right out of high school and loves pumping iron in his spare time—of which he doesn’t have much.

The home page offers visitors a choice of Store (where 5,500 products, mostly nutritional supplements, await) or Supersite (with 18,000 pages of bodybuilding and fitness information plus forums to discuss everything from supplements to teen bodybuilding). At any given moment 2,000 or more users might be in the forums. The content area caters to a variety of users, not just to those who train for competition bodybuilding or power lifting. “Our core customer is the average person at the gym,” DeLuca says. Articles range from advice on fitness regimens and nutrition to customers’ personal makeover stories, complete with before-and-after pictures.

In the store, visitors can shop by brand, product or goal. They can sort the resulting lists by name, price and popularity. For each type of supplement, Bodybuilding.com provides a FAQ and also shows top sellers, least expensive options and “best value per serving.” A Top 50 page, with the site’s most popular products, gives the neophyte a clue where to begin. The Store directs visitors to the Supersite for more information and moral support from fellow fitness buffs.

“They’ve done a great job of integrating commerce and community,” says retail consultant Jim Okamura, senior partner at J.C. Williams Group, Chicago. “I like their very deep FAQ section, which handholds the customer throughout the experience and helps manage expectations. And they cater to many styles of shopping. They’ve really thought through the different types of customers they have, Web-savvy or not.”

Founded in 1975 by two former members of the U.S. Equestrian Team, Dover Saddlery has grown from a retail store in Wellesley, Mass., to a worldwide operation with catalogs and an e-commerce site.

But recreating an English tack shop online takes skill. DoverSaddlery.com has more than 27,000 SKUs and more than 20,000 products ranging from hoof picks and brushes to saddles and bridles to boots and breeches. What’s more, Dover stocks equipment for the three major categories of English-style riding: hunter/jumper, dressage and eventing.

“We really pride ourselves on having a product for any rider,” says Jeannine Moore, director of e-commerce.

Dover patterns the web site on its catalog, breaking down products based on the different riding styles, Moore explains. On the home page, visitors can choose to shop by riding style as well as by product category.

“It’s a way to narrow the product offerings,” Moore says. “Because we have so many products, it’s nice to be able to look at what you’re really specifically interested in.”

By offering the two ways to search, DoverSaddlery.com makes it easier for shoppers to zero in on what they’re looking for, says Shari Altman, president of consulting firm Altman Dedicated Direct. “Everything is clearly displayed,” she says. “They do a really nice job of that.”

Shoppers can search by keyword or catalog number and contact customer service via live chat, click to call or e-mail. And its customer service representatives are knowledgeable riders who can speak from experience.

Dover also prides itself on being “The Source” of information on all things equestrienne. Products are selected by a team of experienced riders who understand the needs of riders and horses. The site also offers riding and training tips written by experts in the field, a web-only feature.

Another feature that helps Dover Saddlery stand out from the herd is the “Test Ride a Saddle” feature, Altman says. “These kinds of web tools help sales for products that are costly and that involve the need for something to fit, feel right and look right,” she says.

Enabling customers to click on the image of a dog toy to hear the sound it makes may not seem like much to many shoppers. But many shoppers don’t have animal companions. And people with pets are a whole different breed of consumer.

Making its toys come to life online is just one example of the lengths DrsFosterSmith.com goes to so pet owners can find the right products. “It helps recreate the hands-on kind of experience you get in a retail store,” says Pat Heerey, director of creative services.

Putting toy sound effects on DrsFosterSmith.com is one small part of the merchant’s underlying philosophy—enabling customers to take good care of their pets. From its beginnings as a cataloger in 1983, the pet supplier has devoted at least 10% of catalog and web site space to articles on pet care ranging from how to trim a cat’s nails to how to prevent heart worms, says Gordon Magee, Internet marketing and analysis manager.

That content enables DrsFosterSmith to really serve their market niche, says Shari Altman, president of consulting firm Altman Dedicated Direct. “They have extensive information—they’ve got a whole site on pet education,” she says. “They really serve the customer both from the products as well as the background information.”

In addition to developing creative ways to present products, the pet supplier revamped its site search feature so that it takes fewer clicks for customers to find what they want, says Jason Coe, director of Internet technology. The pet supplier has a broad product line, ranging from pharmaceutical products to supplies for animals as diverse as dogs, reptiles, fish and birds.

The DrsFosterSmith.com home page has navigation categories at the top and bottom, with the bottom categories featuring pictures of animal groups, which makes it easier for customers to search the site, Altman says. “It shouldn’t be hard for somebody to get deep into this site. It draws them in one way or another.”

DrsFosterSmith.com also revamped all of its images, both in quality and size. “We’re constantly making small improvements to the site—sometimes daily,” Coe says. “You might not see one big change overnight, but there are many, many constant changes going on in the background.”

The advent of the web has commoditized the auto parts and accessories marketplace, making it a challenge to stand out when the same items are available at another site. But JCWhitney.com has seen double-digit conversion rates by viewing this issue from a different perspective than its own: the customer’s.

That view underlies a site redesign that went up in May. “This is the year our site finally reflects our company’s customer-centric orientation,” says vice president of e-commerce Geoffrey Robertson. With stiff competition online and offline, knowing the customer and designing a site that anticipates his thinking has brought increased success. For example, the redesign brings to the fore a key differentiator between J.C. Whitney and competitors: one of the largest in-stock positions in the industry. But significantly, the site tells customers not only how soon products will be delivered but also the facts when delivery dates will be far off.

“We were able to accentuate our strength, but by showing you everything, the good and the bad, it creates more trust in the company,” Robertson says. Ditto the effects of putting customer reviews on the site this year. “We’ll show you a five-star rating, but if there is a one- or two-star rating, we’ll show you that, too,” he says.

The reviews aren’t the only way J.C. Whitney is giving customers a voice on the site. In a massive data clean-up of product specs and descriptions undertaken this year, Robertson and his team created a site feature on product pages that asks visitors for comments on product descriptions and product images, gathering data on copy or images customers find inaccurate or confusing. As a result, the company has updated hundreds of thousands of product images and tens of thousands of product specs on the site.

The comments, which customers can submit in a box that opens up when they click a link on a product page, go right into a workflow process on the back end. “Because we’ve made it super simple, we get a lot of feedback,” Robertson says. “The customer response has been phenomenal.”

When a retailer has Sir Winston Churchill answering its phone lines, a shopper might question the sanity of the merchant’s executives. And that’s exactly how the execs at Moosejaw Mountaineering like it.

Moosejaw.com goes out of its way—way out of its way—to be fun, silly and even stupid to entertain customers, who primarily fall into the phat demographic of teens and twenty-somethings. The object is to build a community of like-minded shoppers looking to talk about hiking, snowboarding and other sporting pastimes while ensuring the Moosejaw brand is top of mind.

“Our goal is simple: to carry the best products and have as much fun in the process,” says Robert Wolfe, founder of Moosejaw Mountaineering. “Our success with fun is reflected in the Moosejaw Madness section of the e-commerce site—it regularly comes in second in total clicks, and we don’t even sell any products there. This is all about community.”

And the community has been responding, as measured by increased traffic and sales. So Moosejaw has been adding more functionality to its site, including alternative product views and consumer product reviews, to keep feeding shoppers more information, and more to discuss. Further, it has leapt into mobile commerce headfirst based on the habits of its young shoppers. The company offers text messaging for Moosejaw Madness nonsense as well as for keeping track of purchases and more. And it is preparing to launch a full-blown m-commerce site.

“Even if m-commerce does not help us in the short term, we want to be known as a company that does what our customers like,” Wolfe says, “which helps ensure they keep coming back.”

Moosejaw.com does an exceptional job of communicating tone and brand; few retailers can so successfully combine online commerce and the spirit of their company, says Sucharita Mulpuru, senior retail analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “They are a great example of how a retailer can differentiate themselves online,” she says.

When an e-commerce site is the official retail site for a nation of rabid football fans, it had better get things right. That’s why the National Football League’s web store—NFLShop.com—unveiled in April a top-to-bottom redesign. The plan: to create a dynamic, interactive, multi-channel experience for NFL fans, says Brian Fitzgerald, manager of NFL Direct.

“We’re really trying to make the user experience something that is new, unique and different every time,” he says.

With 50-plus major brands and 20,000 SKUs, setting up a web site to display the breadth of the products available called for a best-of-breed approach to merchandising and marketing, Fitzgerald says. The redesigned site, launched in July, features 7 different home page designs that coincide with new promotions launched every few weeks. “The site dynamically changes the entire home page look and feel on a weekly basis,” he says.

The redesigned site also features: a page with Flash player technology on which shoppers can view clips of DVDs; zoom and 360-degree rotation on 500 jerseys; and new product pages that feature customer testimonials and content from suppliers; and mini-cart technology that enables customers to continue shopping without leaving a product page.

“Our goal is to have the largest selection of NFL-licensed products on the web,” Fitzgerald says. “To have it is one thing. But you need a technology platform that, from a usability standpoint, consumers can shop and find their product very quickly and just have a fun overall online experience.”

NFLShop.com also is keeping better track of how different merchandising and marketing strategies are working. “We view what people are clicking on, we see best-selling stuff,” Fitzgerald says. “We have tags on every banner on the web, tags on affiliate programs, and we have a clear, detailed understanding of what’s going on with our search program.

“We’re really just trying to aggressively do all the best practices that should be done in this space with online marketing, best-of-breed technology, rich media and multi-channel integration.”

Pet owners love to talk about their furry and feathered friends and Petco.com knows that fact well. “For our target customer, this is their child,” says vice president of e-commerce John Lazarchic. That made the site a natural fit for customer ratings and reviews that, within the context of providing product feedback, give its core audience one more reason to chat about their critters.

Petco.com added that feature this year, rejecting concerns expressed by some marketers about the potential risk in letting consumers express opinions—including negative ones—in a public forum on the site. But Petco.com understands that showing both sides is part of the deal. “We knew that for the program to have any validity, we’d have to be willing to put up negative reviews,” says Lazarchic.

In fact, customer ratings and reviews are starting to pay off for more than a few online retailers this year, partly in terms of brand differentiation and customer relationship building. Petco.com wins not only by leveraging the feature for all of that, but also by integrating it with other applications that are producing hard metrics. Including posted customer reviews in an e-mail campaign this year, for example, produced a 200% higher click-through rate on those e-mails. And incorporating reviews of products into sort-and-search functionality also is moving the needle on sales.

“Being able to sort by ratings is something I haven’t seen a lot of sites do. It’s been really effective for Petco,” says Lauren Freedman, president of The e-Tailing Group. Freedman also notes the range of search results sorting options on the site—by sale, popularity, rating—“gives the customer a chance to be the editor, and that’s important. Customers are into using tools that let them find what they want, the way they want to.”

How do you fit a horse, a dog, a cat, a ferret and a bird in one shopping cart? By creating a common cart that enables one to visit each of the animals’ e-commerce habitats and select and purchase products via the lone cart.

This is just one example—which the company currently is assembling—of how PetsUnited LLC continues to ramp up its business, which includes a growing number of individual animal sites. And it strides forward with new e-commerce sites, product offerings and online functionality based on the input of customers. “Our customers continue to react very favorably to our ongoing efforts to give them exactly what they ask for,” says PetsUnited CFO Chris Van Doren. “We have a dedicated team of staff members working on an ongoing basis to recategorize aspects of the web sites, add new categories and make more changes based on our customers’ wants and needs.”

The e-retailer links individual sites under the PetsUnited umbrella. It offers plenty of practical content for customers, who have myriad questions and concerns about their animal companions. And the sites build communities via forums that unite dog lovers, horse lovers and others with the common aim of ensuring the health and well-being of their animals.

“Each of the company’s sites display a mastery of their subject matter and the fundamentals of crisp, clear e-commerce,” says Maris Daugherty, senior consultant at J.C. Williams Group Ltd. “The expansive selection of targeted pet products and enhanced content combined with clearly displayed stock availability and helpful online communities project that the pet lover is in the right place to shop with confidence.”

PetsUnited, however, is not resting on its laurels—it is striving to improve upon its already effective e-commerce sites. It is seeking, ahem, purrfection. “We’re not satisfied with where we’re at, and we probably never will be,” Van Doren says. “Doing well in e-commerce means continually fine-tuning sites and operations based on the precise desires of the customers.”

The Sportsman’s Guide knows what its customers want, and it’s not frou-frou or gimmicks. It’s a tent, or boots, or a paintball gun. Or maybe the Kill It and Grill It hunter’s cookbook, by rock star and sportsman Ted Nugent. The site is filled with discounted clothing and equipment for camping, hunting, archery, boating, snowmobiling, hiking and fishing. No matter what you’re shopping for, plenty of pull-down menus quickly narrow your search. If you have a paper catalog (which has served outdoor types since 1976), the “catalog quick order” feature is, as promised, very quick. The whole operation is designed to get you equipped and on your way.

Unless you want to hang around and read. There’s a plethora of very targeted and useful content: Links to hunting and fishing license information at every state’s department of natural resources; government tide tables; recipes (anyone for Fiery Fiesta Venison Skillet?). The “Quick Links” section lets users pick their area of interest, (say, small game/varmint hunting or mountain biking) and choose “adventures,” “gear,” or “tips.” Hunters can browse ballistics or arrow-shaft charts to make sure they’re ordering the correct ammunition for their firearm or bow.

The outdoor goods category is packed with multi-channel retailers like Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops. Without a brick-and-mortar component, The Sportsman’s Guide has to work harder, and it does. “It’s not a pretty site,” says retail consultant Jim Okamura, senior partner at J.C. Williams Group, Chicago. “It’s built for commerce. It’s got great selection and national brand affiliations at a fair price. They have really leveraged their direct marketing experience.”

A Buyers’ Club, at $30 a year, gives members a 10% discount on everything except ammunition, plus special catalogs, a dedicated customer service phone line, and the option of stretching payments over four months interest free.

The Sportsman’s Guide and its sister site The Golf Warehouse were recently acquired by Redcats USA, a catalog and online marketer of apparel and home products.