Listening to reseller needs

In the seven years since its creation, Express Online has steadily built itself a niche in the market that has seen it win Specialist Distributor of the Year at the 2009 ARN awards.

The company, which is a 100 per cent online distributor of technology commodities, stakes its business model on being fast and accommodating a reseller’s individual needs. Its offerings to the channel include no credit card fees, no minimum order, licensing enquiry options, and a late order cut-off time of 5pm for guaranteed same-day shipping.

Express Online general manager, Siobhan Delaney-Miller, said reseller feedback in its initial days had shown many were after ease of business from their distribution partners. As a result, ease of engagement has been a critical corporate objective for her and her team.

“Our focus will continue to be on what the customer wants,” Delaney-Miller said. “We’ll be gauging the changing needs of what resellers want from a distribution partner, and trying to fulfil those.”

Right now, on the distributor’s website, is a call for partners to fill out an annual survey Express Online runs, highlighting its commitment to listening to – and learning from – its customer base. It’s not a strategy that will continue to be at the heart of its customer service, Delaney-Miller said.

“We’ve been very successful for the part seven years, and we’re going to continue with that strategy,” she said.

Delaney-Miller replaced former Express Online general manager, Alison McQuarrie, six months ago, having previously been its sales and marketing manager. She now leads a team of 24. Capable of servicing the thousands of resellers it has on its books, Delaney-Miller said the team is scalable and expected to be able to increase revenue at its current headcount.

Should the need arise, additional staff will, of course, be added, she said, but Express Online has always been about a streamlined and efficient system of engagement.

“We have a very easy to use system that accommodates the busy schedules of our resellers,” Delaney-Miller said.

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It may seem like an obvious statement, but vendor partnerships are critical to a distributor’s success, and it is in great part because of its vendors that Express Online can claim its achievements. The distributor has been careful to partner with a range of players that offer a strong portfolio of retail and consumer products – a core market focus.

Vendor partners include Accutek, Acer, Adobe, APC, Apple, Belkin, Brother, Canon, Cisco, D-Link, Hitachi, Kensington, LaCie, Logitech, Microsoft, MYOB, Netgear, Pinnacle, SanDisk, Symantec, and Verbatim.

Like everything else in the IT market, consumer and retail products are a ‘mixed’ story in terms of the economic downturn, Delaney-Miller said. Some organisations have found it tough, while others proving highly successful, but it is nonetheless an industry that Express Online has a lot of confidence in.

“Everyone is optimistic about the future,” Delaney-Miller said.

In a previous interview with ARN, Delaney-Miller said her biggest dislike with the IT industry was margins. As a broad-based distributor, it certainly is an issue that Express Online must grapple with daily.

“If there was more money and more margin, we could be more creative,” she said at the time. “As products become commoditised, the margins get squeezed and I think it’s more competitive.”

It is critical, then, that Express Online can get a lot of product turnover and manage small margins with high sales. Delaney-Miller said it was the distributor’s marketing efforts that helped it excel there, but she was tight-lipped about how it would target resellers looking forward.

“Our main message to market is via marketing and our website – we’re working on a number of initiatives for the next year, but nothing has been finalised yet,” she said.

Ultimately, however, Express Online’s success can be boiled down to a basic truth – if you make a genuine contribution to a partner’s business, you will be rewarded, Delaney-Miller claimed.

“The industry has recognised that we are, and continue to make a valuable contribution to the channel and the distribution industry in general,” she said.