Break new grounds with your own online steelshop

23. September 2020
Selling steel online - how useful is online marketing of your steel?

The online marketing of steel poses a problem for many indecisive steel traders: they don't know what they are getting into and whether they can gain benefits and profit from having their own steel store on the Internet. But online marketing brings many advantages that hardly any trader is aware of. Because one thing is for sure - your own online steel store relieves your employees and enables a clever redistribution to profitable processes, automates existing processes, lets you sell more in less time and eliminates the problem of single purchases by small-volume customers.

This blog post informs you about the chances and possibilities of your own e-commerce platform and confronts common prejudices. As stated in our previous blog post, digital change is on the advance and online stores offer the opportunity to take the right step into the future of steel trading.

The goals of digitalization and your own steel store are clearly defined and also determine their significance. These include the redestribution of resources, automating ongoing operations, acquiring new customers, focusing on problem-solving, expansion, and increasing sales.

But can an online presence successfully solve all these goals?

The short and concise answer is: Yes, it can. Digital change is constantly advancing. Simply everything is ordered over the Internet, but what about steel? Due to deadlocked behavior and antiquated processes breaking new grounds is impeded. A steel store comes into effect where change generates comprehensive and precise benefits:

Capacities:

The capacities in your company are currently designed to handle, advise, and acquire offline customers and key customers. Prices must be checked in your merchandise management system and, if necessary, adjusted to your customers. Whole departments take care of the distribution of the current stock. Your own online store connects your merchandise menagement along with the current stock with the online marketing. Customers can research prices themselves at any time, check stock availability, select packaging requests, create cuttings, select materials, and much more. All inquiries are processed fully automatically - which enables you to re-design a significant part of your capacities!

Increase in turnover:

A fully automated generation of orders ready for dispatch saves time in the warehouse and in the entire ordering process. Thus, even small orders can be processed easily, uncomplicated, fast and without additional personnel expenses. Customers can browse for products in the steel store, find desired materials and cuts, and are not dependent on the help of a sales department. They can easily compile products for projects such as roofing, car ports, fences, warehouses and much more online and have them sent to their place of action.

Individual pricing:

Depending on the customer group (e.g. private, business, major customer) the prices are displayed individually in your steel store. Private customers with small orders will receive a price that will increase your margin significantly to compensate for the effort. A business customer can register as a dealer and automatically receives stored prices for the category "business customer". After the initial setup in the backend these prices are assigned to the different customer groups  and can be retrieved without additional effort.

Focus on the essentials:

The steel store offers the opportunity to break new ground by making savings in ongoing sales. Time spent on answering calls and inquiries enables a reallocation of personnel. Thus, large projects can be researched and new customers can be addressed. Other digital options can be found -  with the goal of increasing sales and improving your margins.

The online steel store - a must-have for the digital change

Currently we are still in the wild west of online steel trading. For those who recognize that there is little competitive pressure, undreamt-of opportunities are opening up. Whether margins, personnel, time, costs, sales increase or the redistribution of capacities. A steel store solves many of the basic problems of offline operations and offers new perspectives and a golden view into the future of your company.