Before I even get started I want to thank you guys for being such a great sounding board for so many of our ideas at WCCC. We are undergoing some real changes here, also known as growing pains! Here is one obstacle we have, NOS parts… There is a reason our competition (for the most part) has no interest in them, they are a HASSLE! Very hard to track financially and in inventory, hard to replace, hard to establish a retail price and hard to assign values to individual parts when you buy them as a lot. We have hundreds of parts we have never bothered to list because we hate to see the deep pocketed “Shelby” crowd snag them (should they not be for our most valued repeat customers?) and how can we justify the many hours it takes to list “one only” parts when we have so many repro parts we still need to list? Did you know the 67 390 GT air cleaner is now reproduced? How would you when we don’t have it on our website yet! So here is the proposed plan: you no longer buy NOS parts on our site, they are free. What I want to do is get these NOS parts off the books as inventory (painful tax burden) and expense them as advertising incentives to use the site whenever possible to place an order. This helps us with our even bigger obstacle, that being we are slammed 7am-6pm every day with phone orders, no relief, one call on top of another. A VERY good challenge to deal with in January of 2012, NOT complaining! Many people who call could be ordering on our website but why should they? What is the incentive? They already got the free hat, key chain and sticker for making previous orders online and it is so much easier to call it in. And what do we say when you call in your order? “Absolutely!” “No Problem!” “That’s what I am here for!” What else is a grateful salesperson to do? Our totally new and awesome website will be unveiled soon and you will have the ability to tabulate previous orders, create wish lists, be notified of items coming off back-order status and more! Tracking your expenditures on our site will allow our customers to accumulate points (maybe 1-3% credit?) towards NOS parts. Granted, it may take awhile to obtain some of the better parts but maybe that would prompt you to encourage your Mopar buddie to order his Magnum 500 wheels along with you? We sure hope so! Anyway… Look for HUNDREDS of NOS parts to show up on our site over the next year, many we forgot we even had! Just ran across a NOS trailer hitch (low dollar example) for a 67-68 we have had for years. How about a 100% complete NOS weatherstrip kit for your 69-70 convertible (high dollar)? Let’s here your feedback. Potential pitfalls? Like it? Hate it?
Sounds crazy. And from you Don I would expect nothing less!
Godspeed!
I’m in - i’ll take that NOS 428 smog and S tube off your hands.
Should make for a good tax write-off
Just toured around the new site Don. Awsome is a good word to describe it, very nicely done! Are the prices negotiable at all on the NOS items, especially if your buying more then one? I see a few I could take off your hands.
That explains a lot. I have a recent experience I could use as an example, but I’m not going to post it here. If you want to hear it send me a PM and I’d be glad to relay it to you. Suffice it to say, there are times when it just isn’t possible to order directly through the website. I’m not saying that is primarily the issue with phone orders, I have no way of knowing that, all I’m saying is I suspect if your website was more efficient it may help.
As far as using NOS parts for incentive, everybody likes to get free stuff. But I think your idea has a lot of potential to piss people off rather than offer them a reward. Let’s say Dick needs an NOS hood for his car. He finds your site and inquires about it excited to finally find what he desperately wants. Do you tell him “Sorry, but our NOS parts are only available as incentives for regular customers”? And if you do, is he going to fill up his cart with repro parts trying to get enough points so he can get the hood or is he going to tell you to pound salt and never order anything from WCCC? Now to avoid that type of scenario, you tell him yes we can sell it to you. He’s happy to get it and pays whatever you ask to get his part. But in the mean time, for the last two years, Jane has been spending every extra nickel she had for the parts that she needs and to accumulate points for that NOS hood. Oops, now you don’t have it anymore. Does that make Jane a happy customer? Probably not.
Also what about the times when people really do need to order directly over the phone? Are you going to penalize the guy that placed a $2000 order on the phone because he had to work out the logistics of core charges and shipping? He should certainly get the same incentives, maybe more.
Reward programs are great, but I think you’re better off not giving incentives that you potentially can’t fulfill. Give out a WCCC dollar for every $100 people spend or something similar. Then let them redeem it on anything. If the phone orders are getting to be too much, get a dedicated line and hire someone to man it. If business is really that good it shouldn’t be an issue.
I’ll have to wait and see how this works out. I don’t use my credit card online for anything! Period! Does this tell you anything?
( I’m just weird that way)
Interesting. But I kind of agree with Mr. Bundy. If anything, give an incentive for on-line ordering (% discount).
And for G, use PayPal. Probably safer than giving your CC# over the phone.
But don’t you more or less have to start a PayPal account with a credit card or your banking information? My wife had a PayPal account years ago and nothing but problems and unwanted solicitations.
I have had a PayPal account for over 10 years and have never gotten any solicitations. Also no problems, except one time I was stupid enough to accept a Second Chance Offer from an eBay seller who turned out to be a guy who had hacked someone’s account and sold the same amplifier to four or five people. But that was many many years ago, and it’s now a well known thing that you should never accept a Second Chance Offer. That was an EBay problem really, not a PayPal problem.
I never had any problems from PayPal. The unwanted solicitations come from PayPal and I just delete them from my email. PayPal also offers a conflict resolution to help get what you pay for if there is a problem. They refunded my money on one purchase when I filed a claim. Seemed good to me. Don does WCCC have a PayPal link on your site? I have not checked.
Al brought up some valid points to consider. I like the idea of WCCC bucks for X number of dollars spent on online orders.
Steven
Love it! We have discussed those very issues and here is what we have come up with for starters. As you guys know, we are not hard line, stick to the policy type folks. For one, look at our return policy, we write it tight but we fudge in every way all the time. Why? Because A.) The customer is always right and B.) As a salesperson the answer should always be Yes! We will find a way to make that happen. First off, an online order qualifies if you went in and entered in your ship to info and go stuck and calls us. Our new website allows us to jump into your order at any point and take over (if you trust us with your password). Online orders can be paid for with personal check via mail BTW. If you call and say, I need that NOS widget bad, need it now, does it not behoove us to figure out a way to say yes? Yes, some folks will be disappointed they did not get the widget they have been eying but that is happening now too. There will always be a need to call and talk to a human, no way around it as we are not selling office supplies here… What we need to do is reward the folks who have the ability to order on line to do so or at least try. Another way to encourage folks to use the site it to do a print catalog. Yup that’s right, an old fashioned, glossy paged catalog. We find a lot of our customers cannot or will not spend three hours on our site to make a large order. Even in thinking about myself on a Saturday winter afternoon, I don’t want to stare at a screen, I want to dog-ear pages while in the prone position watching a movie and eventually dozing off with the catalog on my face. That way when you are done shopping (sometimes it takes a month to figure it all out) you can hand the marked up catalog to your grand-kid and she can consummate the order online. I think the point that making the “points” accumulate for anything on the site is a good one, maybe the NOS parts get redeemed for 1/2 the points? The details will all work out in the end… Stay tuned and keep up the great feedback!
Okay, the problem is that you get too many phone calls so your solution is to get rid of NOS parts? LOL! So NOS parts are a hassle, and getting the phone answered is a hassle, mixing them together doesn’t seem like much of a fix.
People want choices. Some people want to buy things on the web site. Some people want to speak to a real live person. The best solution is to give people what they want instead of trying to induce them to do things that they are uncomfortable with.
How about this: Two phone numbers: one for product assistance, tech support, that kind of thing, and one where you just need to get your order called in. You put the new guy that doesn’t know his J code from his rag joint on the order entry line and you put the old hands on the tech lines.
Different prices, or offers on the web site and the phones are a bad policy. (Ask Best Buy how it worked out for them: Why does a TV ordered on the web and picked up in the store cost less than one purchased in the store?) It divides and confuses your customers for no real benefit. IF you need to, increase the price of every item you sell by $0.50 to cover the cost of improving your service across the board.
This is a great feature. We often have people call that have trouble completing their order and we can do it for them right on the spot. Our administrative function doesn’t even require their password. Complete their order, apply the discounts we even will fill out the payment info for them.
You may find some deviation in this opinion, but I love the idea of a printed catalog. A lot of people feel it’s a big expense for a small return. I don’t agree. I get catalogs from a lot of different companies including Northern Tool, Summit Racing, TPTools, etc. I have to admit I never order directly from the catalog, but I order from those same companies online as a result of looking through the catalog. And the way I see it, collectively these companies have spent millions and millions of dollars on marketing and research. If having a catalog wasn’t effective, they wouldn’t be doing it.
With the majority of my orders placed from work, online is the only way to go for me. I’ve only had to call once, and that was I wanted something not listed on the site(and Lin was very helpful!!) Rewards bux for anything would be appealing to me, as a non-NOS concerned resto-modder. Printed catalog would be awesome!
My philosophy as a business owner is to communicate with my customers in any form or manner of their choosing. Email, chat, text, phone, smoke signals, usps, I do not care. I ultimately want the customer to dictate to me how they wish to be contacted or to contact me. Think of every method you possibly can to allow your customer to order from you and make that happen.
Don, love the new site, I can’t log on and when I send for a new password, I tells me my email is not in the register. Should I just re register. I know my email is in your system between you and JCC, I’ve rebuilt my vert and emptied my wallet. LOL SalD Cougar Geek
Sounds neat.
I like the idea of those NOS parts being offered to the repeat customers. 
No. I must not have been clear, LOL! We have hundreds of NOS parts that we have never listed because, well like I stated, they are difficult and we only usually have one, why bother? Now we have a reason to list them and buy more! Why? They are excellent resource listings even after they are sold, they offer great Google search word optimization and now they will provide us with a way to reward customers for doing a job that we should be doing. Make no mistake WE should be the ones merrily taking orders over the phone and in person but when the customer is willing to self serve lets reward them. Why does Safeway not have this idea? I would do self checkout every-time if there were an incentive, right now I only do it if the line is too long in the full serve line.
Don I have had your website bookmarked for quite a while. You stated our new website, I saw the the CCC forum mentioned but what else has changed? It looks like the same type of layout. Are the new changes on your end?
I think customer service is the key to any business, face to face is best but that can’t always happen in your business. Online is good for a lot of people but the telephone is still the human life line to business. Nobody wants to talk to an automated system. Find the medium that can help with the phone is a good start, 2nd line, new employee to take calls or whatever else puts the phone on pace with growth.
Steven
Ps. Like the idea of a printed catalog.
Don, If you have NOS parts, not listed , how are we to know what you have to offer? Also, many NOS parts can range from a low to very high dollar price, what will determine what you give away with an order, would it be the amount spent?