A question often asked is why an organization would have the need for more than one online store. After all, most web sites (especially manufacturer sites) have a single listing of all their products. While that’s true, usually these sites only have one copy of their product line showing on a web site because it takes an enormous amount of time and money to maintain anything more than that. Really, if time and money were not an issue, most companies would love to have their products displayed in different ways for different audiences. Therein lays the reason to have more than one SellingPoint site. Take some examples:

Pricing and Availability

Why do most manufacturing companies not put pricing and availability of their products online? Here are some possible answers:

1. Pricing changes too often and is not worth the effort to constantly update on the site
2. Pricing is based on quantity or tier of customer and thus not possible to calculate on the site
3. Pricing includes discounts given to dealers and so fluctuates from customer to customer
4. Pricing and availability varies depending on the type of customer, such as a residential consumer versus a large dealer

Is your company affected by one or more of these situations? If so, SellingPoint can help eliminate the headaches associated with these situations.

Traditionally if a company wanted to release pricing and availability, it was done by printing different versions of a catalog or price list that was customized to fit the different audiences. Think of being able to do the same thing with SellingPoint sites. Consider the benefits of have a separate site for each of these audiences if appropriate:

• The public
• Dealers and sales teams
• Architects and draftsmen
• Contractors
• Vendors and suppliers
• Internal personnel

The great thing about SellingPoint is that it has been designed from the ground up to work with multiple sites like this. That means you can create and maintain hundreds of sites in a fraction of the time it would take to do otherwise. SellingPoint lets you configure the pricing and availability of your product line on a site by site basis and even on a customer by customer basis. And since your product information is coming dynamically from your ERP system or other source, such as a Microvellum library, you only have to worry about maintaining your data in that one place. SellingPoint makes it easy to accomplish the near impossible manual task of maintaining thousands of products accurately for thousands of customers. Bottom line is that all the time consuming manual labor and heavy lifting of data is taken care of automatically by SellingPoint.

Customizing Design

A second beneficial reason to have more than one SellingPoint site is customizing the design and layout of the site. No doubt you will want to design the site to look attractive and useable depending on the audience you’re addressing. This is especially true when you have a dealer network. Often times the dealer would like to have the site customized to represent their brand. This is a great opportunity to offer your dealers a custom designed site with their logo and colors, allowing them to site down with their customers and create orders directly online.

Tailored Content

Another situation that can arise is the need to post additional content for the audience being served. At times different images need to be displayed for certain products. Textual content may change as well. For example, a dealer may need more specifications and control over product options and someone looking through the public site would need.

Certain files may need to be attached to products, but only for a certain group of people. For instance, architects may need spec sheets and CAD drawings. Those things are easily attached in SellingPoint, but of course they are not appropriate for another audience such as the public.

Keeping Things Separate

Can you imagine the confusion that would result if everyone in your organization shared the same email address or phone number? You would soon need a team of people dedicated to just redirecting the flow of traffic. The same situation can arise when you attempt to run all orders and quotes through a single SellingPoint site. Again, if you have a dealer network or sales team, this can quickly become an issue if orders start rolling in and they are not easily separated.

SellingPoint addresses this potential problem by giving you an order processing interface that can be divided up by site. It’s very much like adding extensions to your phone system or adding email accounts for each person. The end result is that the traffic is redirected automatically to the right people. This way you can have specific customer service personnel dedicated to specific sites and customers.

Security

Last but not least, protecting your content is a big reason to have multiple sites. Each SellingPoint site can be locked down or opened up as much as you would like. Using that to your advantage, you can easily target your audiences and enforce that only the right people see that content. SellingPoint can be configured to work with single user authorization or can be give group authorization. The site can be opened up to public use for browsing or locked down for only private internal use. You can even control whether or not visitors create their own account or if only you control such provisioning.

Final Thoughts

So while most organizations will start off with a single SellingPoint site, there’s no doubt that most will benefit from adding additional sites down the road. Since these sites are rather simple to setup and maintain, it really represents an affordable and smart way of ensuring that your customers and partners have the information they need 24/7 and always up-to-date.

If you have additional questions about multiple SellingPoint sites, don’t hesitate to send me a message.