What is the difference between selling products in the B2C and B2B channel? How can you meet the customer service expectations in the e-tail channel? How can you use the Dealavo tool to optimise your work? This will be discussed by Artur Makowski – Chief Operating Officer at NOTEBOOKI.PL.
Aleksandra Hołownia, Dealavo: Can you tell me something more about your shop? What products do you offer and how is your offering different from your competitors’?
Artur Makowski, notebooki.pl: NOTEBOOKI.PL, as the name suggests, is a shop where you can buy the most essential tool needed for office and remote work today – that is, notebooks.
Along with laptops, the shop also offers the necessary equipment, peripherals and software. Our offering includes a wide range of IT products – desktop computers, monitors, printers and many more. Nevertheless, our core business is selling laptops.
We specialise in business-class equipment. This means that we do not offer the equipment you would normally see in electronics stores and product flyers of the retailers. We sell top-class products characterised by increased durability, usability and safety, intended for the B2B market. Of course, our equipment can also be used at home.
A.H.: What is the difference, then, between selling products in the B2C and B2B channel?
A.M.: Not all laptop users know this, but the manufacturers use different safety and quality standards for products from these two channels. In the retail channel, intended for regular consumers, the price is at the centre of everything – the lower the price, the bigger the turnover. In the business channel, the price is also important, but not that important. What matters more are quality, reliability, safety, access to really fast technical support and sometimes also prestige. And this is our area of expertise. We offer equipment from the most recognised brands, such as Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Acer or Microsoft. The average price of a laptop in our shop is almost twice as high as the price of the equipment sold on the consumer market – these are rather expensive solutions, so the process of decision-making is longer and a little bit different. Customers who plan to make such an expensive purchase, first gather information about the product and then, before making the final decision, very often want to talk to an expert in the field who can give them some advice.
A.H.: What do you do to respond to the needs of your customers?
A.M.: Our team of employees consists of continually trained experts and enthusiasts who can define the needs of the customers with great precision and choose the best and most efficient solutions. That is what makes us different from our competitors – we are simply experts in notebooks, particularly for the B2B channel. However, we are also available for home users. Anybody who is looking for a good laptop can easily contact us and get the help they need to make the right decision and feel that their money was well-spent.
What is more, we have a special platform dedicated to modern technologies, TECHSETTER.PL, where you can find tests of the equipment we recommend. We ourselves perform these tests in line with a very thorough procedure.
A.H.: Apart from your own shop, do you also offer your products on other channels, such as Allegro or Amazon?
A.M.: Currently, we have been observing a growing trend of moving away from traditional retail into e-tail, and that is why we have been preparing for this process also on our market. We are present on Allegro, where we sell products in the Lenovo ThinkPad brand zone. When it comes to Amazon, it is still in its infancy in our industry, but, judging by the situation in neighbouring markets, we can expect the significance of this channel to increase.
Our priority is still our online shop – this is our future and the channel on whose development we focus the most. In the first quarter of 2021, we launched a new shop, which is more intuitive for the user than the previous one, and we started relevant marketing activities. It is worth mentioning that many customers who decide to make a purchase on our website contact us first to make sure that they made the right decision. That is why our shop has a slightly different function from what people would normally expect.
A.H.: How do you use the Dealavo tool to monitor your presence in e-commerce and manage prices?
A.M.: The Dealavo tool is extremely helpful both in managing everyday prices and creating a long-term price strategy. Thanks to Dealavo, we can quickly and precisely determine our position on the market.
The IT hardware sector, contrary to popular opinion, is a low-margin sector, and that is why we have to constantly monitor the market situation in order to prevent money loss. We have been working on our own tool for product feed management, and we are planning to integrate it with the Dealavo solution to make the processes even simpler in the future.
A.H.: Which Dealavo functions are the most useful to you?
A.M.: For me, the best function are the price alerts, which allow you to respond immediately to any changes on the market.
A.H.: How did the use of the price monitoring tool affect your business activity?
A.M.: Thanks to Dealavo, we work faster and more efficiently. If we were to make analyses as complex as those conducted by your application using our own resources, we would have to create a dedicated analysis department. Thanks to Dealavo, every Product Manager has most of the information they need in one place – this really makes many processes a lot easier for us.
We expect that in the near future the share of online orders in our shop will be rapidly increasing, and the Dealavo tool helps us to prepare ourselves for this change.