“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”

In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.

With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.

A partnership.

Marine Electronics started as a joint venture partnership between Blair Peach and a bricks and mortar retailer NavStation.  NavStation had tried ecommerce in the past but had found it difficult to sell anything on their website.

Having a background in eCommerce Blair approached them to do a joint venture on the Marine Electronics website.  NavStation had all of the supply lines because of their existing relationships with distributors in New Zealand and a reputation to back it up, while Blair offered his ecommerce know-how combined with Netconcepts’ web development and search marketing expertise.

Blair states, “It’s a bit of a learning curve as well.”  The management of NavStation admits that they are not familiar with what is meant by “pages being indexed” or “words being found” and how that relates to ecommerce, but are basing the success of the website on product sales.  The results speak for themselves.

“The results are pretty good and we have achieved good visibility so far in such a short amount of time.  We are in a highly competitive space.  The work we are currently doing is price pointing for the web and that is ongoing.  In the marine electronics arena, price is extremely important because it is all commodity stuff.”

The competitive landscape.

Distributors in New Zealand are struggling with a lot of import competition from the US because marine related products are reasonably priced there.  Blair says, “Having New Zealand based websites who can compete is a good thing for NZ distributors as it keeps the existing channels in tact.”

For many boating hobbyists, they are bargain sensitive and tend to do plenty of research before making purchase decisions.  It is important to have online stores they can purchase from in the New Zealand market rather than going abroad.

Netconcepts’ GravityMarket ecommerce platform has been a key ingredient in Marine Electronics success.

Netconcepts provided ecommerce store design and build services to Marine Electronics along with logo design and brand guidelines.  The site’s infrastructure is built using the search optimised ecommerce platform, GravityMarket which is also hosted and technology maintained by Netconcepts.

Blair Peach was happy with the result.  “We felt confident that we would get a website that was well built for organic search and has a good ecommerce engine and so far it is proving that.  I didn’t have any fixed ideas of what the site should look like, except that it needed to look clean and focus on the product.  Netconcepts designed the logo and overall colour scheme.”

Blair also noticed huge traffic gains from search engines naturally, without having to pay for the exposure. “In a quick period of time we had a PageRank of 6 due to the Netconcepts homepage link.  Great value.  That got us into the market and many of the dealers and distributors in the market noticed it pretty quickly without us doing any advertising.

“We got a quick response and we were high up on rankings straight away.   The site got spidered fairly quickly and in fact every product got spidered quickly so we had no visibility issues.  I have seen other sites that have taken a long time to get spidered and indexed by search engines.  We had a bit of coaching from Dave Cooper at Netconcepts on how to do linking, terminologies and much more.”

Marine Electronics have started capturing email addresses and implementing other online marketing activities.  “We’ve got a GravityMail account so we’re looking at setting up our first newsletter shortly.  We are also tracking conversions in Google Analytics including a “check out funnel” and use of the “tell a friend” email links.

Tracking and measuring success.

GravityMarket enables Blair to optimise pages throughout the site including category and product pages.  Blair states, “I spend some time tuning the words and ensuring they are placed in the right places on the site.  GravityMarket enables us to manage the url, the title, page content, category names and much more.”

“Google analytics is telling us that 75% to 80% of the traffic coming to our site are new visitors.  Our bounce rate is about 30% which is not too bad.  And our average time on the site is 3-4 minutes, however if we remove bounces from that number, people are spending much longer on the site and are viewing quite a lot of the site.

“Along with that we have seen that some of the strategies we have put in place such as placing specific content on pages we are generating good click rates.  So it is good to see that some of our thinking is paying off.”

Marine Electronics track what words and phrases they rank for to understand where their traffic comes from.  Both worldwide and NZ only searches are reported upon and they have found that many of the terms they are targeting they are displayed above the scroll line where people are most likely to click.

Many of the terms are brand focused and there is certainly a long tail there too.  They also rank number one for many specific product terms even with plenty of competition for those terms.

Blair says, “For [marine electronics] we’re #1.  For [ray marine], which is one of our key terms, we’re #3 in a worldwide search, and #3 for a NZ only search which is just behind Ray Marine themselves.  Considering we have only been here for four months that is pretty good.  [fish finders] is a very competitive term web wise, so we’re ranking at #4 for [fish finders nz].”

Leading up to the holiday season.

Marine Electronics are not doing any Google AdWords advertising at the moment, but may give it a go when leading up to their peak season.

Recreational electronics is a seasonal business.  Marine Electronics aim to have all of their products on the site and merchandised before September of each year so that they have tested and proven all of the terms and the site before that time.  80% of sales will happen during the lead up to Christmas and they are aware that their Marine Electronics ecommerce website needs to be ready well ahead of that time.

Strategies are also being put in place to generate sales during New Zealand’s off peak seasons by targeting offshore markets within their summer periods.

Blair’s final comments.

“Netconcepts understands how to create an ecommerce website that technically offers visibility in Google and other search engines.  With that knowledge Netconcepts has built an ecommerce engine that enables us to tweak our products ourselves.  A website is never finished so we are able to tweak and tune our product which is really helpful.  If we need help, I know Netconcepts is only a phone call or email message away.”