Listen to an in-depth interview with Matthew Henton, Marketing Director, eSpares. See the RetailWire Podcast below.
By George Anderson
There's hope for the mechanically challenged among us who until now have been resigned to paying repair shops to fix our broken appliances. ESpares, a website that sells spare parts for home and garden products to consumers around the globe, and its handier customers have teamed up to show us how to fix pretty much anything.
Matthew Henton, marketing director at eSpares, told RetailWire, "The vast majority of what we sell kinda clicks or snaps into place or the most advanced equipment you need is a screwdriver. So people are finding it easy to fix it themselves."
The U.K.-based company has seen its business grow steadily since it launched in 2004.
"There certainly seems to have been in the last couple of years a real
appetite for fixing it yourself among consumers. The economic conditions obviously
play a part in that," said Mr. Henton. "People looking at tightening
household budgets, looking at holding onto an appliance for an extra few years
whereas they might have replaced it and fitting spare parts themselves. And,
yeah, people just looking at callout fees from service firms and thinking 'well,
could I do that myself if I got the right part?'"
Among the keys to eSpares' success have been product reviews from customers.
"We went into this with a little bit of apprehension as to whether we would actually just have utter silence from our customers and nobody would be interested in reviewing. But what we got was quite a shock to us really ... We got people just sharing their experiences and their tips. And their advice for other people on the best ways to fit these spare parts. So what tools you'll need, how long it'll take you, things you need to be careful of and make sure you hold onto the screw at the back otherwise it'll fall down into the machine. And we just sort of started to develop this enormous wealth of knowledge coming back from our customers that we could have never of imagined creating ourselves," said Mr. Henton.
Calling the response from customers "transformational," Mr. Henton said eSpares realized, "We need to harness this as much as we can because if we are going to grow the business we need to give more customers more confidence to take on fix-it tasks themselves."
A logical next step was social media.
"Twitter is something we've found incredibly useful," Mr. Henton told RetailWire. "It's allowed us to talk to people who aren't yet customers and let them know they can buy spare parts, so we are able to look out for people who are just tweeting saying, "The washing machine has broken." We've been quite proactive going out and finding people who we think might potentially be customers. But equally we've seen people who are customers sharing their experiences on Twitter and that seems to be a real buzz around what we are doing there."
Video is another point of emphasis.
"We want to be there and show people in most cases, these repair tasks are much simpler than you think. So big focus on video; we are adding more product areas," said Mr. Henton. "If we can encourage our users to create the video content themselves and we'll host that within the site then that expands the capacity with which we can increase the number of videos that we have."
Discussion Questions: Are there lessons in customer engagement that
other retailers can take from the eSpares' experience? What does the eSpares
example say about how consumer education can influence retail performance?
[Editor's Note] ESpares' success has not gone unnoticed. The company
is a finalist in the "Etailer of the Year" category in the 2010 Oracle
World Retail Awards. The winner will be announced on April 22 in Berlin, Germany.
Other finalists include Argos.com, Hsn.com, Marksandspencer.com, Ocado.com and
Walmart.com.