Old Line Business Reaps New Online Revenues

Gas and welding equipment distributors typically are retail outlets that have a wide selection of products and retail clerks who answer questions and help to find products.

And, as everyone knows, when it comes to bricks and mortar for retail operations ,what matters most is location, location, location.

When it comes to online retailing — or e-tailing — it’s no different.

“The real secret to successful online retailing is to make as full a commitment to that website as you would any branch store,” Wally Brant, president and chief executive officer of Indiana Oxygen Co., said.

“If your branch stores are not stocked well and not manned well, you couldn’t get a customer following. It’s the same thing with e-tailing. People have other choices when they shop on-line, so you have to make sure your site is the easiest, fastest and friendliest, and provides the same type of technical advice of a branch store,” Brant said.

Indiana Oxygen (www.indianaoxygen.com) is a 92-year-old company. Brant said it is the oldest distributor in the business, and he noted that electronic sales contribute just over 20 percent of its current total gross revenue.

Brant said that anyone can implement a website and that even small retail establishments can benefit from an online “e-tailing” site.

Brant said he first began hearing about e-tailing as a member of the Gases and Welding Distributors Association (GAWDA) and decided that his company needed to know more about it.

Indiana Oxygen was offered a place on a website for a buying group that the company belonged to. That site included 14 other companies.

“We were one of five in our group that declined, and ended up doing our own website,” he said, adding that developing the site required him and others in his shop to attend seminars and to “feel” their way through the process.

Many smaller, one-store operations don’t have e-tailing operations.

Greg Stoneback, president of Metro Welding Supply Corp. in Detroit, has one store and no Internet site for placing orders.

“We have a site for our customers to go to get information on gases and MSDS. We participate in on-line ordering with universities and hospitals for gases. Using their software we plug in our part numbers and pricing information so their purchasing departments can place orders, but we have no hard goods ordering,” Stoneback said.

In addition, many smaller distribution operations depend on large gas producers or manufacturers to drive traffic to their stores, rather than to have their own websites.

One Praxair distributor said customers usually find him through the websites of Miller Electric or Lincoln Electric Co. because those companies have store directories to online shoppers to a distribution location near to them.

Brant said making a website successful involves commitment on the part of the company and putting resources and people behind it.

“What we elected to do was to put in place a staff that is extremely knowledgeable in welding supplies, then man the phones or the Internet to respond quickly to people who might have questions for us with respect to what equipment is right for the job, answer questions and advise customers through the purchase, the same as our stores would. We have three people assigned to do nothing but answer the phone,” Brant said.

Customer service for online e-tailing is more important than it is to even a store, Brant said.

“If the customer has a bad experience in the store, he says ‘what the hell, I’m already here.’ That’s not true online. If they have a bad experience or get frustrated on your website, they can click away immediately and go somewhere else,” he said.

Brant said that one of the keys to Indiana Oxygen’s success has been “Internet trolling” in which the company goes on existing media such as eBay and posts its products for sale.

“More than half of our sales come through eBay. That’s a very competitive media. We will try to snag a customer from eBay and try to get those customers to be Indiana Oxygen customers.

“We hope those who buy our type of products will be repeat customers for us.

“If they buy a welder, they’ll need consumables. We try to make that initial contact so easy and so accurate, so pleasurable and so fast, that the customer will say ‘I’m going to skip eBay and go right to Indiana Oxygen,’ ” Brant said.

The key to making this method work is that you have to be sharper, Brant said.

“We are very conscientious, and we follow their rules strictly because we rely on eBay to be our first point of contact. Anybody can put a product out on eBay and sell it for the lowest price, but we hope eBay is just the introductory site to drive new customers to Indiana Oxygen. eBay has become like the Yellow Pages — you don’t think about going anywhere else,” he said. Brant said that anyone can get into the e-tailing game if they are willing to make the investment it takes to do it right.

“What we’ve done — when you consider I’m about as untechnical in computers as you can get — gives hope to other people like me. With the right effort and the right people and the right investment, you can get into this. It’s not reserved for the technically advanced,” he said.

However, Brant is quick to add that when he says “anybody” can get into e-tailing, he means anybody who is willing to add three people to their staff and give those people the opportunity to be available to service customers through this media.

“It’s not easy, and there are no shortcuts, but it’s not rocket science either,” Brant said.