Client: Prime ABGB

Background
Gulbir Bhatia is a savvy electronics retailer. He owns a shop front, PrimeABGB, in the busy electronics hub of Mumbai, at Lamington Road. Gulbir retails laptops, power supplies, industrial strength CD/ DVD burners, computer hardware, gaming hardware and a whole bunch of other accessories through his outlet.

He also is an exclusive distributor for India for many of his products. Which means that he also sells stuff to other retailers across India. But, it isn’t business as usual for Gulbir. For he is facing a new threat to his traditional retail electronic business. There are organized electronic retail chains on the one hand, and appliance retailers on the other, which have also diversified into selling computers to make up for intense competition in a crowded electronics retail business.

The organized chains have one great advantage over Gulbir. They buy in bulk, negotiate in bulk and ergo enjoy better prices/ margins than Gulbir can.

The Challenge
How does Gulbir get his news of a better price and service to his customers. Without any advertising budget, how does Gulbir reach out to people?

Gulbir decided that the web was the most cost-effective way to do this. He can reach his associate resellers, distributors and customers all through the web site. Communications could be quicker and more cost-effective and his personal time, which was mostly spent on the phone, would be greatly reduced with better access to information by his customers.

The Solution
Pigtail Pundits built for Gulbir, a content management enabled web site with online commerce and a newsletter system.

After the requisite training on the system, Gulbir’s in-house team now updates the products [adds/ deletes and modifies product info]. The shop enables Gulbir to have different pricing for different shopper groups: Customers, Affiliates, Resellers.

Gulbir’s team also sends out regular newsletters, sometimes twice a week, on specials available for limited time.

Results
Gulbir’s now convinced that the web is the way to go to survive in the electronics retail business.

A few things the web has taught Gulbir:

• An online shop means fewer phone calls. All the folks who used to call him earlier can now go to the shop and checkout what’s the latest price or product, instantly.
• It’s the cheapest way to reach his audience, many of whom are from smaller towns of India and now getting used to online purchases [actual sales]
• Many of his local customers visit the web site before coming to his shop for the merchandise [assisted sales]
• Gulbir gets enquiries for dealership online
• An online shop needs personal attention and vision to get started and to keep it going [Gulbir has a trained staff of two now focusing on purely web orders, fulfillment, updates and newsletters]

Under the Hood

• PrimeABGB is built on Joomla 1.5 with Virtuemart 1.1

Visit the Prime ABGB website.