Waardijk is a Dutch online and offline shoe retailer with a history dating back 170 years. The family-run business, once a local brick-and-mortar shoe shop, is recognized for the quality of their products–all made and sold in Europe–along with their exceptional customer service. For the past 7 years, they have been working with the marketing agency Expand Online (a part of Dept) as their trusted partner in online strategy and campaign management. As ecommerce and consumer behavior rapidly evolves, staying agile is essential for retailers. Consumers are shifting away from smaller web shops and towards larger ecommerce sites and marketplaces. Waardijk was aware that this trend could have a negative impact on their business. In order to stay ahead of the game, they need to be among the first to take action. So, together with Expand Online, they decided to start selling on the Amazon marketplace. By taking the initiative as a “first mover,” they would have the chance to work and gain experience with Amazon before it became the norm. As a starting point, they chose to get their products into the German market, via Amazon.de.
Listing their products on Amazon meant that Waardijk needed a product feed that met the required Amazon specifications and was compelling enough to drive both visibility and sales. That said, Expand Online was facing three major challenges.
As these challenges suggest, Expand Online needed to ensure their time and cost investment was kept to a minimum. This would not only guarantee their own ROI but also create customer delight.
Luckily, being new to Amazon was no issue for Expand Online. Already working with Productsup, a cloud-based solution for managing product data feeds, the challenges listed above were nothing to worry about.
Based on successful past experiences, Productsup was the logical tool to be used for this project.
Thanks to Productsup, expanding Waardijk’s business to a new major shopping channel was achieved without any manual work. Within the first day, Expand Online had prepared and uploaded a high quality feed to Amazon.de and Waardijk was officially selling to an entirely new market. Within the first week, Waardijk had increased their online sales by 10%. With limited prior knowledge of the Amazon platform, manually adapting and exporting the product feed would have been extremely timeconsuming and would certainly not have been cost effective. Now that they have set up their base, Expand Online can focus on Waardijk’s internationalization. Having successfully completed the first step by getting onto Amazon.de, the next country expansion will be even easier.
Not having to manually add products to Amazon eliminated the most time-consuming aspect of the process.
Expand Online (part of Dept) is an online marketing agency that doesn’t like advertisements–irrelevant ones, that is. They think outside the box. Their success is powered by telling a company’s story to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time. They do this by employing the latest techniques to accurately interpret large data sets. More importantly, Expand Online works with some of the best online marketeers around.
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