One of the initial hurdles Alaska Arms faced when enhancing its online presence was finding a company with the right expertise to develop the new website. The site would need flawless functionality, a seamless checkout process, and excellent technical support. Another essential element is customer service, especially after the sale.
“It’s one thing to sell someone something; the next important thing is customer support,” says Melani, who has been manufacturing firearm accessories for about fifteen years and has been a member of the American Custom Gunmakers Guild for nearly forty years.
Generating online exposure is a constant challenge for Alaska Arms, which specializes in making custom metal accessories such as scopes, triggers, and floor plates. Melani sells these parts to a wide spectrum of customers, including dangerous-game hunters in Africa, Europe, Australia, and Canada. To reach his target market, he relies on advertising in gun magazines as well as blogs, YouTube videos, search engine optimization, and other digital marketing tactics. “Just having a website is not enough; you’ve got to be able to get it in front of people,” Melani says. “You’ve got to have those clicks; conversion rate is critical.”
For ARG Industrial, customer adoption of digital tools began slowly, but it’s now rising rapidly as more businesses source products online. ARG Industrial encountered initial resistance from employees, too, who viewed the digital platform as a potential threat to their jobs. They were concerned that customers’ ability to self-serve would reduce the need for salespeople.
But over the years, employees have come to understand that digital tools allow them to offload repetitive and sometimes tedious tasks to focus on relationship building and opportunity finding. Consequently, this has led to greater acceptance of the ecommerce platform. “Our customer-facing employees see the digital tools as force multipliers for them, not as a threat,” Mortensen says.
One of the issues Summit faced when expanding its online presence was deciding what to offer in the ecommerce store. “The retail store has much more than teas, spices, and Made in Alaska products, but we needed to prioritize what we could add to the website,” Apgar explains. “We realized that those three categories were what really made our store unique.”
There were technical difficulties with designing the website. The company has three locations—a retail store, ecommerce site, and wholesale program—so setting up the technical and inventory side of the site was extremely tricky. “It took a lot of planning on the front end to determine how to present these options to the ecommerce customer, and then how to track and manage the bulk inventory for retail and wholesale,” Apgar says. “We’re still working on finding the best solution.”
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