When it comes to traditional MFP/copier sales, industry dealers have established territory rights set forth by their manufacturer partners that dictate which geographic areas are kosher for doing business. Companies that offend this edict will have their assets seized, doors barred and effectively banned from selling for a five-year period. OK, so maybe we’re embellishing…consult your OEM representative for actual rules and regulations.
On a more serious note, there is an interesting footnote on the subject of customers who find dealers through their websites; more specifically, their ecommerce platforms. In this case, should dealers be compelled to turn away new-found business from a client located beyond their traditional selling boundaries? Is this a gray area?
For those dealers that use certain tools, such as Keypoint Intelligence’s UVERCE, territory infringement is not as great a factor. As Anthony Sci, president and CEO of Keypoint noted in a Q&A with ENX Magazine: “The beauty is you can enter the ZIP codes for whatever dealership is serving those counties. When the end-user goes to check out, if it’s a county or ZIP that the dealer doesn’t cover, it won’t let the customer proceed with the order. There are also other dealers, mainly printer dealers, who have no territory restrictions, so they’re less likely to have those restrictions on their website.”
Still Developing
As not every dealer has territory restrictions, and not every ecommerce platform in the industry utilizes UVERCE, this can make for a mixed bag of rules without an accepted standard. Chip Miceli, CEO of Pulse Technology, doesn’t believe it’s practical to establish sales territories where ecommerce is concerned.
“The subject of ecommerce territories has caught the attention of our industry and has been debated nationally at a few industry meetings that I’ve attended recently, including American Coop and a Sharp conference in St. Lucia,” he said. “Dealers are asking how to handle the matter of territories if they receive orders from outside of defined service areas. The industry continues to evaluate the question.”
Miceli also noted that Kyocera is doing some research and work on a program to see if it can offer a solution for this issue. Thus, it definitely appears to be a fluid situation without consensus.
The more likely dealers are to target their advertising efforts to the local markets they serve, the less likely it is for them to attract end-users beyond their geographic scope. But the online community is a global one, and a dealer’s blog providing tips/tricks on any type of product or service can attract the attention of would-be buyers beyond imagined boundary lines.
Keven Ellison, vice president of marketing for AIS in Las Vegas, believes that as long as manufacturers standardize pricing for ecommerce, it then becomes a question of delivering service and support. AIS offers three options with free shipping for clients within its territories: printers can be drop-shipped directly to the client, it can be picked up locally, or the dealer can deliver the device (a more comprehensive white glove delivery and setup is available at a cost for local clients).
“This is a different buy,” Ellison noted. “People typically go to an online retailer’s store—a Costco, Best Buy, Staples or Office Depot—purchase it, take it home and set it up themselves. Unless you’re allowing your enterprise customers in your territory to use the back end [ecommerce portal] and purchase everything they want, they generally have the expectation that it’s going to be drop-shipped to them. And that’s one thing we had to consider in order to provide free shipping. We had to figure out what it was going to cost if there was somebody outside of our territory who wanted it shipped to them.”
Best Buyers
Selling via ecommerce to clients outside of their territories is not in the best interests of a company such as Kelly Office Solutions of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The ZIP code question to filter out beyond-limits buyers is only one of five key questions that can help ensure the dealer is maximizing its potential from a service standpoint, according to President Tim Renegar.
“The whole idea is to sell it where we can service it,” he said. “All of that information we collect for the build-out process—the number of prints they make, the number of people who are in the office—will allow us to determine how to build out a service contract, and then the buyer can select from several options that would be added to their payment.”
