The Carlson Company has seen its share of changes in the industry since it began selling service equipment to dealers in 1972. Over the years, technology has changed and the company maintained a solid reputation with its customers as one of the best suppliers of equipment.
In order to continue evolving with the times, the company recently launched a new website that is fully E-commerce enabled. While the old website was effective, according to company president Andy Carlson, it was more or less there to educate customers and advertise their quality line of service equipment.
Carlson told MPN that the website is ready for business now with a full-fledged E-Commerce backend for dealers to place orders online.
“This is all new for us,” says Carlson. “It’s exciting for us, too. We’ve never sold online, and we’ve never even published pricing online until now. But now we’re pulling out all of the stops, and we are publishing all of that for anyone and everyone. We’re pretty much trade focused anyway because we sell big tire changers, wheel balancers and motorcycle lifts, but people sometimes want our lifts in their garage, so our equipment is available for everyone to order.”
Today’s service departments are evolving rapidly as profit centers for dealers, according to the company. The Carlson Company wants to help dealers lead the way with their innovative products that are brought to market specifically to address the needs of today’s powersports dealers. “We are always looking for new marketing methods and efficiencies, and obviously a full-featured website with our entire catalog at the click of a mouse is going to be a big deal for us and our customers,” says Carlson. “And it’s all mobile-friendly as well.”
Customers have the option to register on the site to add convenience for future purchases. “The website gives you the choice to register or not so it’s up to the customer,” notes Carlson. “But if you do a lot of ordering, registering will save you time. If you register it has all of your information stored securely and it gives us ways to communicate with people, and we have a chat portal that allows anyone that’s browsing to ask a question.
The website is powered by Shopify, which takes care of a lot of the backend legwork and lets The Carlson Company focus on what they do best.
Carlson also notes that the orders are calculated with shipping charges so customers can punch in their address and get a final price of the equipment shipped to their door. Side extensions for a lift, for example, will automatically be setup to send via LTL truck rather than UPS because of their experience with shipping the units and knowing how to avoid damaging them.
To check out the new website, visit www.thecarlsoncompany.com.
