OCOS
Contractors – Save Time & Money
By buying online.
If you are a professional contractor or a supplier in the home re-modeling and building industry, a key question you face is: How do I (or how does my business) stay relevant in this digital world?
By the time we embarked on our first major home remodeling project, we had long since given up on shopping in stores in favor of shopping mostly online.
By then, we had become accustomed to ordering on Amazon or clicking on an app, and a meal would show up in 30 minutes.
Technology led us to have high expectations. We expected purchases to be seamless and straightforward.
However, some product categories were slow to change, and the building materials industry was one of them.
Our contractor did a good job, but choosing and getting supplies to the job site took a lot more time and worry than necessary.
Schedules changed, and workers had to stop working to pick up the materials they needed to keep the project moving along.
For us as customers, choosing products, whether it was flooring, cabinets, or backsplash tile, was a tedious process that left us wondering if we were getting the best selection, the best prices, and the best brands.
In the time since that renovation, two things have changed.
What’s driving the trend by builders, reno specialists, and contractors to buy online?
Like other businesses, pros in home building and home improvement are finding they need to use technology to improve operations, keep a lid on costs, and meet customer expectations.
In this digital world, construction has been one of the slower sectors when it comes to keeping pace and embracing technology, but that’s changing.
As we launch into 2020, here are four reasons that the building materials industry will shift from traditional bricks to online clicks.
So much work, so few workers
Professional contractors get hit by both booms and busts in the economy. When contracts are plentiful, workers are not. Labor shortages are driving up installation costs, and they are only forecast to get worse.
And when it comes to that economic bust, contractors will want a broad selection, competitive pricing, consistency in product availability, and predictable delivery.
A bricks and mortar store can only carry so many products – even the big club warehouses such as the corporate stores offer tens of thousands of SKUs to their customers.
Amazon, by comparison, counts its products in the hundreds of millions. E-commerce comes with unlimited shelf space; we can stock as many products as we want on our OUR CONTRACTORS ONLINE SHOP.
We can leverage our data to make accurate purchasing and inventory decisions.
From the millions of visitors to our site, we can predict consumer trends and the best selling products in different regions.
This allows us to have consistency in product availability based on demand by region.
A contractor can’t spare workers’ precious time worrying about delivery schedules and meeting the logistical challenge of getting building materials to the job site on time.
Using technology to bypass the middleman and eliminate costly pickups means direct to-the-home or job site shipping becomes a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
