D2C eCommerce: Keeping Your Retail Partners Happy when Selling Direct

If you’re relying only on word of mouth for new customers or think that your customers don’t want to buy online you’re missing out.

In just 10 minutes, you'll learn:

3 approaches to go Direct-to-Consumer without ruining your retail relationships
10 things to consider when going direct to consumer

Duration: 10 minutes

Useful Resources

Direct to Consumer Ecommerce in a Post-Covid19 Landscape - https://www.maginus.com/imagine/reports/direct-to-consumer-ecommerce/

Transcript

Hi, I'm Toby Clements, Account Executive at Maginus. Welcome to part 2 of the Direct-to-Consumer eCommerce series. In this session we address the elephant in the room: How can you go Direct-to-Consumer without damaging your retail relationships? We will aso outline 10 things you should consider when preparing to go Direct-to-Consumer.

Right, let's get started.

So what about the elephant in the room? So keeping distributors happy and maintaining control. There's three ways to do this or three ways that I've done in the past which is 1. stage releases, 2. partial releases and 3. exclusive releases.

So, stage releases - you have MPD and NPI launched over different channels at different times.

You have partial releases which is individual SKU’s released on some channels but not on others.

Then you also have exclusive releases where you would have an exclusive product line which would only go to certain channels.

So again back to Tommee Tippee for an example of this.

In a first example which is a stage release - you may have your direct consumer release which could be one week, three weeks or ten weeks before the retailer release and all of the models within the range will get released on the the retailer site at the that time.

The next option is the partial release - so you'll have a direct consumer release and the retail release at the same time but you hold back unique SKU’s, it could be certain colourways, it could be an enhanced version of the product with a better feature. It totally depends on your how your business operates and your catalogue.

Then the next one is the exclusive release which is where only the Direct-to-Consumer channel would have the product line and the retailer wouldn't get it.

Now depending on how aggressive you are in your approach to Direct-to-Consumer you can actually just flip this model on its head and actually you would initiate the retailer release first. So you would support your retailers then launch later on your D2C - to show your commitment to them and then realise that Direct-to-Consumer benefit. You can do the partial release where you would only have core lines yourself and you can also do the exclusive release with your retailers and then just have the classic “find a retailer” link.

Now there are reasons why you would do this the other way round. First of all is to be less aggressive but also in terms of the exclusive releases it may be because you sell something like a pram or a car seat that requires either some kind of fitting or requires some kind of practical demonstration and the customers don't yet have the confidence to buy that product online.

For the full transcript visit: https://www.maginus.com/imagine/articles/d2c-ecommerce-podcast-keeping-retailers-happy/