Re: Seasons
Responses in green (I was feeling lazy and didn't want to divide up the quote)
Posted by erikgreen
So you're saying that iboats should invest money in custom development for these bulletin boards to try to help people have less breakdowns on their boats, so they therefore buy less stuff to fix them?
Yeah, I can see why they don't think there's much money in that
Boating costs plenty just to maintain your vessel. Upselling preventative maint items is just as profitable (more so?) as any replacement part. Moreover, teaching someone to repair their own vessel guarantees you a parts sales opportunity. Ignorant people bring their boats to a dealer, where the parts are much less likely to be ordered from here. Even if the dealer does order parts from here, you have lost the upselling opportunity afforded by having the boat owner staring at your upselling ads. A dealer will never say "The GPS in this upselling ad would be nice on this customer's boat, I think I'll buy it". Teaching the consumer to avoid dealer visits means you have the chance to sell them anything, beyond just the parts they need.
These forums are very nice, and cost a lot as they are to keep running... the bandwidth costs alone would buy someone a new boat each year.
Bandwidth is nearly free. Most budget colocation will give you 1-2TB per month for under $100/mo. Amazon S3 is even cheaper.
Iboats is worlds ahead of most other retailers in the fact that they recognize the value of these forums and keep spending to support them, but remember that it's a cost to them, not a source of income.
There are countless examples of retailers creating social networking and community areas on their sites. The simple marketing reason is when people leave you site, you lose a customer and all the data they bring with them. Keep people on your site and you have the opportunity to sell them anything, monitor their every word, preference, location, purchase and habit and upsell at every opportunity. Simply keyword searching posts and replacing the text of, say "ujoint" with a link to a page of ujoints in the store would be guaranteed to increase sales, directly from the forums. If you lose money from a forum, you are putting zero effort into monetizing, as forums tell you more about a person than any other type of website.
A simple feature of adding a custom BBcode to vbulletin in which we could show a part # and it would turn into a link to add that item to your cart would make buying recommended parts as easy as one click. I'm an internet junkie and I find buying parts a pain, as I can never find the correct page, and when I do, the description is so vague I don't dare buy it in fear of having to return it because I oredered the wrong part. There are people on here (Don, JB, JustJason, some others I can't recall) who can tell you the part # from memory! Making a script to convert any part # mentioned into a link to add the part to your cart would be a trivial addition.
I consider this circumstance the equivalent of standing in a store, holding a flyer advertising an item, and getting no help as to locating the item in the store. You want the item, you plan to buy the item there, but there is a gap between where you are and where the item is found. Closing that gap is the difference between a sale and no sale. The very reason stores have "call" buttons for sales people on nearly every isle. If an item not easily locatable or a question about an item goes unanswered, a sale is lost.
No matter how great the advice here and no matter how many people join and post, they're not going to make money off of these boards directly. So spending a ton of cash to make things nicer/better featured for the folks here is a "nice to have" thing, not something they don't do because they're too dumb or not paying attention.
I couldn't disagree more
If they weren't paying attention, then the very large influx of new posts and new members would have made the site too slow to be useable, and we'd all be annoyed at that. They're still supporting us, even though many of us have never bought from them (hint).
If people aren't buying from the site they are currently on and going elsewhere instead, I could hardly put the customer at fault. The direct analogy is a customer leaving a dealership they are standing in, driving down the road in order to buy the same item from another dealership. The question asked should be "What made that person prefer to take the effort to go somewhere else rather than buy what was obtainable here?"
