CornerHardware.com Mini-Profile |
|
Peter Hunt, Chief Operating Officer Concept Stage: Jan 1999 Biggest Obstacles: Executing the little things Key
site features: In December 1998 Peter Hunt was searching the Internet for ideas on building a tree house. What he discovered was a number of online communities that had linked their websites, but nobody had figured out a way to hookup these communities with e-commerce. That germinated the first seed of an idea to build an online community for home improvement enthusiasts, where they could share ideas and buy products and materials at the same time. Peter wrote a business plan and incorporated CornerHardware.com with the help of a friend. The first thing they did after incorporating was to go out and interview people in focus groups. With the help of a market research firm, they were able to identify what frustrations people had with using the Internet for home improvement. The result of this research was a blueprint for a new business model. This became CornerHardware.com as we see it today. “That document is the foundation on which the company was built, and it continues to be the driving force in our relationship with the customer,” says Hunt. CornerHardware.com went live on January 25th 2000, deliberately avoiding a launch during the peak holiday season, when teething problems would have been a disaster for the site. One of the first things you notice about cornerhardware.com is that it opened on day one with a 24x7 live call center and live chat functions. “What the focus groups told us was effectively ‘email’s great but it doesn’t work that well because you don’t get an answer for two weeks, you can pray for an answer in two days, but you’re lucky if you get an answer at all.’ With home improvement, people want an answer immediately.” Cornerhardware.com have outsourced their call center to eSupportNow through an exclusive contract that prevents eSupportNow from offering call center services to their competitors. eSupportNow have hired plumbers, electricians, hardware store managers and other professionals to provide quality advice to customers of cornerhardware.com. “E-commerce sites are usually just about selling stuff” suggests Hunt “A lot of the time [people] don’t just want to buy, they want to learn, they want to browse, they want to have fun, and so we figured out there was a demand for value added information in home improvement that could be used to drive commerce, because people can’t get their questions answered in a brick and mortar store.” One way to answer those questions is to give them live chat, the other is to provide high quality information. Cornerhardware.com address the latter through proprietary feature articles and buyers guides that educate and empower buyers to make the right purchase decision. This has the added benefit of reducing returns. “People interact differently with the internet than they do with books,” says Hunt. “What we found was that people don’t like to read on the Internet. They want little snippets of information that are highly value added, that can help them do something quickly.” The result: animated how-to guides that are “designed to take the hard out of hardware”. One unique aspect of the site is the community message system. This uses technology from ShopTok to provide an environment where visitors can create their own virtual communities, sharing ideas and exchanging messages with people who share similar interests. This goes beyond a traditional message board by allowing cornerhardware.com to inject into the community appropriate product information. Community members can browse and select products from within the community. The community has developed a fun, positive approach to home improvement and lacks much of the negative writing found on many bulletin boards. The site is developed using InterShop’s Merchant development tools. The biggest challenge on the road to launch, according to Hunt, was to execute on the little things such as, “making sure that the email confirmation to a customer says what you want it to say, making sure your shipping policy is what it is. Making sure that when someone clicks on a button the results are as expected." “If you can’t be number one or two in a market, find a market where you can be number one or number two. You have to have some type of feature that addresses a problem or appeals to a customer, and you have to go after that customer with a vengeance,” adds Hunt. “Our angle is high customer service. There are people that don’t want service,” people who do their own research, figure out what they want, and buy it. “My wife loves the site. She lives on the call center. The first thing she does when she gets on the site is clicks on the call center just so she can have a shopping buddy. She chats with them while she’s shopping. She asks them to give her their opinion, and that’s what were all about, catering to the customer who has questions, who wants answers and is looking for service.” According to Hunt, "if you’re going to play in the space with the big boys, you have got to have sustainable competitive advantage. You have got to build proprietary advantage." Peter doesn’t feel threatened by Home Depot. “Their strategy is to drive people to the stores.” He doubts they will sell online without cannibalizing their brick and mortar store sales. |
   |
|
See also eRetailNews 2000-3 report |
Updated: March 2000
