History of Audiomania. Part 1

The history of Audiomania is a story about how a company from a small “point” selling home appliances, has become one of the largest all-channel retailers in Russia. We will try to simply and truthfully write about how a small store became a big company, how our hobbies became a part of our profession, what difficulties and pitfalls (under the conditions of Russian reality) accompanied us along this path - and what advice we can give to beginners. retailers based on their own experience. Our story is not a plot from the series “10 steps to success” and not the reasoning of prominent “retail theorists”, this is a story about real business and what conclusions can be drawn from what once happened to us.

The history of Audiomania began in 1997, when several businessmen organized a retail outlet on “Gorbushka”. Then it was not a shopping center, but a large parking space, where sellers arrived early in the morning on trucks with goods and usually sold it quickly enough. A little time later, it was decided to open a permanent “point” on the “Riga Radio Market” - there the first store of the company appeared, which then had no name. The radio market itself consisted of a variety of containers, which now served a different purpose. In the lease agreement it was stated: “telephone container”. The range of the store then already included a variety of audio and video equipment. Gradually, the main direction of the company shifted towards high-quality audio equipment.
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The name was born a little later. Once, while sharing time with vendors, there was a conversation about the name for the company. “It’s impossible without a name,” said the partners to the company's founder, Artem Firemark. But the name was not born. Colleagues added: “Well, are you working for audio maniacs?”, To which Artyom replied: “well, I shouldn’t call the company with Audiomania!”. But everyone liked ...

By 2003, the company already had an office and a warehouse. A second store was also opened - at an electronic fair in Prague, and the business began to acquire a more delineated specialization - not just selling audio equipment, but providing solutions for people who primarily love and appreciate good music. So, we carefully selected the assortment, removing from it what we think does not correspond to the tasks. In addition, we have agreed with several manufacturers and have established our own deliveries from abroad, which could not help but attract the attention of other Russian retailers - so Audiiamania has also become a bit of a distributor.

However, the distribution division developed more slowly than the retail one — large sums of equipment were required to purchase large quantities of equipment. Therefore, when Marvel Distribution (one of the largest distributors on the Russian market) approached Audiiomania in 2007 with the proposal to enter into a partnership agreement to merge the distribution division of Audiomania with Marvel, Audiomania’s management agreed and the company was able to release funds from the distribution and fully concentrate on retail sales. Some of the employees from the distribution department of Audiomania went to Marvel.

Such changes have only helped Audiiomania - in addition to offline sales, we were able to seriously think about the development of multi-channel retail. Of course, until 2007, Audiomania had a website, but to call it a full-fledged online store was, to put it mildly, difficult. On the one hand, there was almost no competition at that time in the field of e-commerce with quality home audio and video equipment - there were only a few large companies that went online before, on the other, there were reasonable doubts that we would be able to attract a sufficient number of interested consumers who will buy online equipment of this class.

At about the same time, we paid close attention to the market for electronic components - radio components and accessories for the manufacture and modernization of acoustic systems. This trend turned out to be a “gold mine”, since, unlike in many foreign countries, “Do it yourself” remains a popular topic in Russia. This was partly due to the acquisition by Audiomania in 2008 of the St. Petersburg store Samodelka.ru, which sold various audio components and had good connections with manufacturers and suppliers - later this purchase helped create a full-fledged offline store in St. Petersburg, as the retail space and staff “ Homemade "moved to Audiomania.


Audiomania Shop in St. Petersburg, grown from St. Petersburg Homemade.ru

So, by 2008, we launched our offline business online, and the St. Petersburg online store DIY was made our offline division in St. Petersburg. Such “castling” demanded some preparation from us.

First of all, I had to noticeably modify the site. If before 2007 it was rather just an online product catalog of the company, then later users could access not just viewing, but also ordering goods on the site, consulting a specialist, choosing from various delivery formats and calculating its cost (for this, of course, it was not necessary only work on the site, but also modify some of the relevant business processes of the company). And for starters, we had to give ourselves answers to a number of questions (we knew answers to some of them right away, and some decisions had to be optimized in the process of working on an online store).

1. First, who will buy on the site and how will the buying process be carried out?

Experimentally, we determined that there are three types of customers at our online store:

• Buyers who probably know what they need, in what configuration and from which brand. This is especially true of "homemade", those who are interested in creating their own acoustic systems. They, as a rule, possess certain engineering knowledge and do not need consultation when buying a particular radio component or accessory - they buy immediately and without any hesitation.
• Those who come to the site, read the article / look at the review in thematic media. These people, as a rule, “want as in the picture,” and also often made a choice before visiting the site (which, unlike homeowners, is not always dictated by rational knowledge of the characteristics of the product). Such people sometimes can also purchase goods in the online store without asking for help from consultants. Or they just need to confirm the correct choice.
• And finally, the buyers of large and "serious" audio systems. In the case when the consumer plans to re-equip the entire dwelling and / or purchase several components of the audio / video system, he, as a rule, not only is attentive to the reviews and reviews in the media, but also holds long conversations with our consultants, for the purchase in general can come to Moscow or St. Petersburg from another city - the cost of the flight compared to the cost of the purchase are relatively small, and "touch" the product and check it in action before a large-scale purchase - the task is important i.

Initially, the online store, of course, was focused mainly on Moscow and the Moscow region, but with the advent of the St. Petersburg division (and as our customers studied), it turned out that they (depending on the category again) were ready not only to purchase our products online, but and even come after them to our showrooms from other cities. Of course, the first payment for the goods was made in cash to the courier. However, once we announced the possibility of paying for goods with electronic money (Webmoney, Yandex.Money, etc.), a qualitative leap occurred in the growth of the audience from the regions. Now in the online store for the goods you can pay in 10 different ways - and this is one of the factors that attract the attention of the audience. Even if the buyer chooses the traditional methods of payment, he still appreciates the freedom of choice given, especially if the buyer is remote.

2. Secondly, how to avoid losing a client if the desired product is not in stock?

We even wrote a separate article about this, as we faced various reasons for the lack of goods in stock, and, in accordance with this, we developed various strategies that allow us not to lose customers because of this.

3. Thirdly, what kind of life situations can accompany the purchase of goods, and how (based on this) make its purchase as comfortable as possible?

Having started working on an online store, we thought about how to make the purchase of our products as comfortable as possible. The idea is trivial, but very many (sometimes non-trivial), but we managed to find quite logical solutions due to this approach.

Consultations with experts quite often accompany our purchases. If the buyer is not an engineer and is not obsessed with purchasing a strictly defined product, he, as a rule, consults with specialists on the site, and does the right thing. The fact is that not only “call center guys” communicate with customers, but people who are well-versed in audio equipment and (also importantly) who have a lot of experience working with it. These can assess the needs of the client, tell him what is best to do and what to pay attention to - in general, thoroughly discuss the topic. Therefore, for us, the duration of a telephone conversation with a client, say, at 1 o'clock is a completely normal phenomenon.

And, of course, since it is impossible to know everything, we have several consultants, each of whom specializes in a particular field - someone knows all about high-end audio systems, someone will be able to tell in detail about portable devices and additions to them. We do not have a separation between “consultants working with an online store” and “consultants working in an offline store” - these are the same people, and they are divided not by sales channels, but by areas of knowledge.

By the way, since these same people work in the company's regular stores, the buyer can approach and communicate with them face to face without fear and reproach - it’s not necessary to demonstrate your exceptional awareness of audio technology issues (in the Hi-Fi sphere, for a long time it was not the norm that the sales consultants looked at the "uninitiated", frankly, haughtily).

By the way, with regard to consultations, we do not focus on a certain communication channel - if the user is uncomfortable to call (there have been such cases), the communication is transferred to a chat or to an e-mail - for some buyers this question becomes decisive.

The next point we worried about was the situations in which the buyer was not ready to purchase the product immediately. We believe that this is quite normal, both in the case of relatively small acquisitions and in the case of expensive systems (after all, “expensive”, in general, is a relative concept). So if the consultant would obtrusively propose to “place an order right now,” the buyer may begin to hesitate, if at all, he will shove to buy something. With such customers, we constantly keep in touch via SMS or mailing - while consultants do not need to do everything on their own, because the CRM system takes the decision to send a message on a scheduled basis. It also happens that a large order is broken into parts and paid, respectively, in parts. This happens, for example, when a customer makes a repair and together with the foreman / architect / installer creates a solution even before the stage of finishing the room. At the moment, we have 1800 open orders in our work - and we, and buyers, consider this situation to be completely normal.

In the same way, we believe that the buyer has the right to listen to the equipment “in action”, even if he has not yet paid for it (or did not even make a purchase decision). At one time, we were one of the first to equip our stores with showrooms, where you can come and listen to the equipment - before that, these rooms were mostly equipped only with large distributors.

The search for areas in which we could improve the user experience continued. The trade-in-mania service, unique in our market, was born, when buyers can turn in used acoustics and, by paying the difference, buy a new one - for us the load connected with the organization of such a service turned out to be quite capable, and buyers have one more reason trust us (and become regular customers with the possibility of upgrading the equipment purchased). However, it was necessary to attract marketing budgets of manufacturers, otherwise nothing would have happened. Several leading manufacturers of speaker systems were happy to participate in such an unusual project.

Another moment we decided to work on is the process of delivering equipment to the regions. Usually this is a “sore” moment for the buyer, as it is usually not clear at online stores whether it is possible to deliver to the region and how much it costs. In the best case, there is a list of companies delivering goods with an offer to go to their sites to clarify the cost. In order to partially relieve this headache from the buyer, we came up with a “delivery calculator” - the user sees on the product card how much the delivery of goods to his region will cost depending on the carrier company (which, again, several), and how the total purchase price will change. Moreover, having considered all the options, we decided to take a risk - and made delivery to major cities free with orders from 8,000 rubles. And we were the winners - the sales volume fully compensates for our costs of transporting goods at our own expense.


"Delivery Calculator" Audiomania with the possibility of free delivery

4. Fourth, how will our offline store be connected with all this?

We immediately decided that our trading system would be multi-channel - or rather, omnichannel. Now we call it “all-channel”. That is, the buyer, whatever channel of communication with the store he chose, for us will always be one buyer - information about him in the database is not duplicated. This allows us, firstly, to collect more information about him and make more targeted proposals. And, on the other hand, this greatly influences our attitude to business - the fact that we do not divide employees into “shop assistants in stores” and “online consultants” allows us to think first of all pick up people with deep knowledge in a certain area, and not “generalists” who know a little of everything, and even duplicate - for offline and online. Similarly, the fact that a buyer comes to the site and leaves it without buying anything does not mean that he is lost - if after studying the site he comes to buy at an offline store, we will understand that this is all the same person.

Thanks to this approach, our concerns regarding online commerce did not materialize, and since then, the Audiomoney online store managed to enter the Top 100 Russian online stores list according to the Kommersant publishing house and become a regular winner of the Online Retail Rewards awards "And" Hi-Fi. The best site.

Findings:

The job of transferring business from offline to online can be difficult, however, if you approach it with thoughts about the client, he (the client) will not remain indifferent to your efforts (the same is true for online stores that do not have offline sales points) . Here are some tips that (as shown by our experience) are useful for attracting and retaining loyal customers:

1. The more alternatives for your customer, the better. This is true for delivery options, and for payment methods, and for additional promotions and special programs. Even if most buyers are content with the standard options, the very idea that you are not constraining them hand and foot with the lack of alternatives will make them feel much freer on your website.
2. The same applies to the format of communication with the consultant - prepare your employees to the fact that if the buyer is comfortable, for example, writing to e-mail, then so be it.
3. Try to consultants really understood not only how to place or pay for the order, but also in the product itself. It is not necessary to be superprofi, but to understand what they are talking about, these people should - try to select people who are genuinely interested in what you are selling for this job.
4. Do not rush your customers. Let them know that consulting with a specialist does not oblige them to immediately purchase - it gives you the opportunity to offer them a product that is more suitable for the client.
5. Calculate options for free delivery to the regions. This does not mean that you need to immediately make the whole delivery free - perhaps in your model you will find a combination of conditions that will allow you not to charge customers for shipping to certain regions starting with a certain amount of the order. In Russia, free delivery to the regions is not as widespread as, for example, in the United States - so in the eyes of buyers, this will not be a “taken for granted” step, but a huge competitive advantage.
6. More often, put yourself in the client's place and think about how to make his life better. These will not necessarily be large-scale changes. It is possible that you will start with small and simple steps that, even if only slightly, will distinguish you from your competitors - a little more interesting / beautifully designed / targeted mailing, a little more payment options, one or two additional shipping companies for delivery to the regions - this is not a “silver bullet”, which in one fell swoop will bring you all the clients, but the final and achievable goals, the implementation of each of which will make you a little closer to the buyer.