Cliptomania is a family-owned venture that sells ear clips online. This venture was established in 1999 and quickly became profitable, because the market niche for the ear clips was not saturated at that point of time. Now Cliptomania sells 90% of its products in the USA, and 10% overseas. Cliptomania does not own any brick and mortar stores and all ear clips are sold online.
There was a large number of strategic issues that the owners faced at an early development stage. In order to start selling ear clips, the most suitable sales channels had to be considered. The Santo family lived in New Jersey and did not possess sufficient financial resources for opening a brick and mortar store. Therefore the most reasonable way was to create a web-site based on the Yahoo! Store template.
Two years after the venture was established, the Santo family moved to Indiana and could allocate more time to the business development. Several adjustments helped to boost sales and make the store popular. Most of the changes were related to the web-site’s design and functionality of online payments. After some time, Cliptomania was relocated to another online platform that was better in terms of design and security.
However, the biggest challenge in the recent years has been the growing competition in the fashion industry and emergence of the ventures that are similar to Cliptomania. Cliptomania will need to focus on the practices that will be necessary for the improvement of the web-site’s position in the search engines. Moreover, the Santos will have to decide what kind of advertising should be used in order to generate the traffic, because according to the case study the sales have reached the peak and are now stagnating.
Cliptomania’s owners took correct steps in terms of user experience design, use of key search words and content marketing so that the web traffic could grow further. At the moment, the web-site is user-friendly and visitors feel comfortable when they navigate through the web-site pages that provide colorful photographs of the ear clips and short product description. In addition, several key search words make Cliptomania visible in the major search engines.
However, as it was written above, a lot of competitors emerged in recent years and all of them use Internet as the main sales channel. For that reason, the approaches that Cliptomania applied earlier have to be revised. First and foremost, if the goal is to expand the business activities, the Santo family should hire assistants, salespeople and specialists in e-commerce. Order processing requires much time, but online promotion and web-site update are left behind. Moreover, because the competition is fierce, the Santos should develop the new sales channels. For example, they could cooperate with jewelry stores or make ear clips for some other brands.
Finally, e-commerce emerged into an industry with a large number of unique features. Being online and selling at a competitive price does not guarantee success any more. It is a high-quality integrated web-site that can effectively convert visitors into buyers (Rababah & Massoud, 2010, p.1). What is more, the Santo family should think of developing a mobile version for the Cliptomania web-store. The mobile version should be quick to load and simple to navigate in order to generate a large number of impulse purchases (Mills, 2014).
Some other steps could include investing more resources into getting the top search engine position by means of the Google Ads or paid content writing. If there are not enough financial resources, Cliptomania could use various social media in order to get access to the target audience. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether being present on Facebook or other social networks would increase the sales. In any case, social networks could improve the customer oriented image of the company and show that Cliptomania keeps up with the times. To sum up, digital marketing and diversification of the sales channels should propel Cliptomania to the next level.
References
Mills, J. (16 April 2014). 5 Reasons You Absolutely Must Optimize Your Website for
Mobile. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-mills/5-reasons-you-absolutely-_b_5122485.html
Rababah, O., Masoud, F. (2010). Key Factors for Developing a Successful E-commerce
Website. IBIMA Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.ibimapublishing.com/journals/CIBIMA/2010/763461/763461.pdf
