Occasionally, I'll correspond with prospects (clients, even) on the subject of whether to outsource their company store or manage it in-house (I received a similar comment regarding this today). One thing I've learned about company stores is, despite their similarities, no two are alike: each have an eCommerce platform (purchase order options, credit card, points, gift certificates, approval processes, etc.) and each require some element of warehousing, distribution, procurement, and creative marketing but they are vastly different based on products, usage, and purchasers.
The most common trait they share is one of priority: each store is designed to create, make available and distribute branded products (print, apparel, advertising specialties) to a select audience as efficiently as possible. Getting branded products from concept to delivery is the most important criteria by which each store should be evaluated.
John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing recently wrote a simple but powerful blogpost directed toward marketers: The Five Things People Really Buy. John exhorts marketing professionals to make sure they communicate to prospects how their products and solutions are going to:
- Make them more money
- Save them more time
- Allow them to avoid the frustration of doing stuff they don't like (like wasting time and money)
- Help them save or not lose money today and in the future
- Help them feel better about themselves
The bold emphasis is mine (not John's) but these highlight the common responses clients have repeated to us once we have successfully launched and managed a store for them. Creating a company store to manage branded materials saves time, helps outsource the things they don't like doing (or don't want to do) and helps them save or not lose money by bringing their branded products into a controlled environment.
When trying to decide whether or not to outsource your company store, the most important criteria by which each store should be evaluated, getting branded products from concept to delivery as efficiently as possible, should remain central in your consideration. Even if you can create, manage, make available, and distribute more efficiently than an outsourced vendor, you should still cautiously consider it. Becoming a fulfillment center requires warehousing, inventory, call center help and more, and some companies are doing it; most, however, prefer the alternative. Why?
When a CEO asked me why they shouldn't just manage their store in-house, I replied with a question, "Aren't you in the business of selling ______? Isn't selling ____ your #1 priority?" To elaborate, perhaps one should ask a few more questions:
- Would diverting the time, energy and resources of your staff away from your most critical priority be worth it?
- Does your current brand management system support your #1 priority? If so, is it worth the disruption to test your theory?
- If you have no existing system for managing branded materials, do you create from scratch what already exists and if so, to what purpose?
Deciding to outsource or manage in-house is not merely a question of available resources, it is one of prioritization. Heed your #1 priority or opportunity costs are certain to abound. Instead of, "can we do it?", or "how do we do it?", the critical question to ask is, "should we do it?"
