Fietsenwinkel.nl is the online master in electric bike sales, as shown by recent WUA research. Edouard Rekko has been commercial director at Fietsenwinkel.nl for 4 years. A conversation about service as a sales driver, continuous focus on the website, and opening physical stores to support digital efforts.
Congratulations, Edouard Rekko. You're the winner of this research on online electric bike purchases. How important do you find it for Fietsenwinkel.nl to be the best?
Edouard Rekko: "In e-commerce it's enormously important to be the best, especially when you compare it to physical retail. In physical retail you have thousands of 'firsts' based on a physical presence that's geographically determined. In e-commerce you only have room for two or three firsts and then you also have to deal with a very harsh selection: Google determines what happens in this world and there are only three positions that really get clicked on. The difference between numbers 1 through 3 and the rest is gigantic. The top 3 can make investments that create distance from the rest, but as soon as you're not part of that top you can no longer invest to become first and then it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy."
You not only score well on findability in the research, but also on the other themes of the WPS model. 22% puts you at number 1. And in WPS score you take a 5-point lead over number 2 Gazelle.nl. What's going so well for you?
"Fietsenwinkel.nl has a pure focus on selling bikes, online and offline. We're busy day in, day out with better selling and servicing bikes. This while for example number 2, Gazelle, has to handle many other things, like product development and production. The advantage for Gazelle is of course that they can benefit from a brilliant brand history of more than 100 years, while we've only existed for less than 4 years."
What role does customer research and putting the customer first play in your daily work?
"We do structured customer research to a limited extent. We do conduct on-page questionnaires, for example we ask why people drop out on the website. We also do small studies with our customers about how they found us, often with questionnaires afterwards via email. Besides that, and I find this very important, our e-commerce team participates in our call center, each person one day per quarter. We also often have sales events, and the e-commerce team is also deployed there to talk with customers. Additionally, in our Amsterdam office we have a store, and they work there too. I often stand there myself to hear what customers find important!"
What's your biggest digital challenge?
"The attribution story of website traffic. We make large investments in Google and marketing. Finding the right marketing mix, that's what I find challenging, because everything interferes. You can't turn communication channels on or off. TV advertising has an impact on Google Adwords spending. Especially now that we're also opening stores, our attribution story is becoming increasingly complex. If you enter a store because you watched a TV commercial and buy in that store while you previously researched via our website, then that website cookie we place never gets labeled as a successful conversion. So we're looking at how we can still influence the customer through email to be able to read the cookie after purchase and properly attribute everything."
How do you view service in relation to sales. Could service ultimately be the new sales in the retail and bike industry? How do you respond to this (with the combination of bricks & clicks and physical service points & the e-bike test center)?
"We're very dominant online and mainly have small competitors, but we focus much more on competition with offline, where we have 2000 local competitors. Those are basically all bike shops, which are almost all physically closer to the customer, but at the same time we're in their pocket via online. Service is an important reason NOT to buy online, which is why we're opening physical service points and started working with mobile mechanics. When the bikes we sell break down, our customers call us. We need to respond well to that and provide good service. So setting up a high-quality service apparatus is a very cost-effective way for us to respond to service requests. Service certainly leads to sales, because by establishing good service we can remove objections to buying from us."
That 100-day return policy you've introduced, is it used much? It's just a few days longer than the legally required 14. Is 100 days return policy necessary or is this marketing?
"You want to remove every doubt. People want to sit on a bike. We stand behind our advice, and behind our advice about frame sizes. You can tell a customer: trust me, I'll give you the best advice. The only way to show that you trust yourself is to say that our customers can return a bike if it turns out not to be the right choice after all. We're convinced of our products. If someone wants to return a bike they can, and we just take it back. We make a loss on this customer, but the most important thing is that we keep a satisfied customer. That's much more valuable to us."
Are there any exciting things coming up, what digital innovations are you working on? Is the sale of the 200,000th bike already in sight?
"We now have 3 physical stores, in Amsterdam, Almere and Hilversum. 3 more will be added in 2016. We now have 100 service points, and we connect new service points every week. We now sell dozens of service appointments per day. When I see how quickly our service transactions are growing, it wouldn't surprise me if we soon do more service transactions than bike transactions. We're now working on a platform where people can book those service appointments. That will be a new dimension to our site. Fun to mention is that it took us 8 years to sell 100,000 bikes. I think we'll sell the 200,000th bike this year."
