(Direct) Any company that’s been in e-commerce nearly 10 years has a pretty decent claim on being thought of as a pioneer. But Buy.com, which started selling tech goods and consumer electronics through a Web-only store back in 1998, isn’t content to sit around and tell stories about the old days.
Last October it launched an extensively remodeled Web site. The avowed mission? To at least keep pace with — and perhaps catch up to — Web tycoon Amazon.com, the largest pure-play Internet retailer.
“We’ve moved our site to a Web 2.0 model, shaping things around our customers, trying to give them as much information as we can,” says marketing vice president Jeff Wisot. “Our goal is to be the beginning and end of the shopping experience.”
That means helping visitors early in the shopping process by providing copious how-to guides and reviews. This effort to inform has led to perhaps the most visible change in the site, the addition of Buy.tv, a video channel of product and vendor reviews produced by Buy.com. The channel offers new two-and-a-half to three-minute shows more than weekly, and the archive has grown to 400 shows and a library of 60-second product reviews by merchants.
The Buy.tv shows usually involve presentations by product experts, often supplied by the makers. The company features four products a week. Wisot says some of the site’s visitors return every week to see what’s been posted, and many write in to suggest products for coverage. Buy.com also makes the weekly Buy.tv show available for automated download through iTunes and other content sites.
Buy.tv concentrates on consumer electronics and technical equipment, but there are plans to expand into some of Buy.com’s other product lines — including home and outdoor products and its new baby store — in the near future.
Buy.com lets visitors submit their own product reviews and rank products on the ever-popular one- to five-star system for overall quality and specific attributes. Consumers can upload video reviews if they wish, with the most popular video review of the week highlighted in a feature slot under the “Reviews” tab.
When the research is done and visitors are preparing to buy, Buy.com goes further than other online retailers to assure these potential customers that they’re getting the best price. Another change to the site was the construction of a marketplace platform of third-party sellers with which the company has partnerships, much as Amazon partners with selected vendors. These are featured in a column on the right side of the page, along with their current prices for the item and an “Add to Cart” button that lets shoppers buy immediately.
“We usually have the best deals, but if our merchants are running better ones, we want the customer to see them and take advantage,” Wisot says. Buy.com now carries products from more than 100 “Marketplace Sellers” on its site and aims to have 500 by the end of the year.
But beyond that, the site runs links to competing retailers on many of its product pages, so if shoppers want to know what Staples or HP Small Business is charging for a Linksys wireless router, for example, they can get the basic sale and shipping information on Buy.com’s page or switch to the competing site.
“People ask if we don’t lose business by providing this information,” Wisot says. “But we believe it helps bring those in-market customers to us first rather than to our competition.”
Buy.com also lets customers pay with both PayPal and Google Checkout, the search engine’s automatic transaction platform. Wisot says that dual offering has been another important differentiator with customers. Being an early Checkout adopter also gives a visual boost to the company’s search marketing around specific keywords, since Google places a small Checkout icon next to Buy.com’s ads on search results pages.
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