One Web site is colorful with lots of features. The other is almost straight text.
One is backed with over 20 years of related retail experience. The other is the brainchild of a serial entrepreneur.
One has been online barely three years, the other eight.
One spent over $50,000 on Web design and development. The other spent barely a penny.
One is number one on Yahoo!* The other is number one on Google.*
Each took a different approach to selling used medical equipment.
Each was in the black almost from the start, and each has been turning a steady profit.
So which one would you buy from?
PEMED: A No-Nonsense Approach to Selling on the Web
Serial entrepreneur Mark Zirinsky had not planned on getting into the used medical equipment business. It just kind of happened. An acquaintance happened to mention he needed a couple of exam tables and Zirinsky happened to find them. In the process he found a truckload of used medical equipment, and a business was born.
Like many entrepreneurs, Zirinsky saw an opportunity and ran with it. He started out, in January 1993, with a phone and a desk and not much else. Pretty soon his 100-square-foot office was filled with used medical equipment and Zirinsky expanded, eventually taking over 40,000 square feet of warehouse space.
To sell his used medical equipment — everything from autoclaves to wheelchairs — Zirinsky decided on a catalog model. He wrote up brief descriptions of his stock and sent a broadcast fax to prospective customers he had carefully researched, at first medical equipment manufacturers, then doctors and hospitals, too. By the last year of the faxed catalog, it totaled 60 pages.
Often the fax would cut off in the middle, and people would call Zirinsky immediately, not to shout at him for clogging their fax machines but to get the second half of the fax. Zirinsky knew he was onto something.
In mid-1998 Zirinsky ditched the broadcast fax and went entirely online. (He had set up a Web site in early 1997.) But he stuck with the catalog approach. And despite the bare-bones format — pictures with price and a brief description — no search function, no shopping cart, and no information about how to buy, except for listing a phone and fax number — Zirinsky has had customers literally climbing through the loading docks to get his super-discounted equipment.
Zirinsky's company, PEMED, for Production Engineering--Medical Equipment Division, has been in the black since just six weeks after going into business, and has had consistent year-over-year sales increases of 20 percent. Moreover, PEMED is the number one (non-paid) hit out of 23 million on Google when you search for "used medical equipment," and the number three hit (after being number one until very recently) on Yahoo!*
The key, says Zirinsky, is knowing who your customer is, or "knowing who not to reach. Rather than spend effort and time trying to sell something to somebody who doesn't need it, you want to target your audience."
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| PEMED uses the simplest of layouts for its e-commerce operation. It's bare bones, but the company is seeing 20 percent growth year after year. |
It's all about maximizing your sales, he explains. When a customer calls Zirinsky, or he calls a prospective customer, he can pretty much determine within 15 seconds if there is going to be a sale. If it looks like the call is a waste of time, Zirinsky hangs up. "If you're not going to buy something, goodbye."
Of the approximately 2,200 hits PEMED gets each day, about one-half to three-quarters of a percent turn into a sale. But Zirinsky doesn't care about hits. He cares about actual dollars...or pesos, or euros, or yen. Money in the bank. (Zirinsky shipped product to some 44 countries last year and fielded queries from more than twice that.)
He also doesn't advertise. He just sends a broadcast email to 60,000 current and prospective customers once or twice a month.
"We had paid advertising in different trade magazines, but we canned it all about four years ago," says Zirinsky. "The people who were buying stuff were coming from the Web site. Why advertise to people who, for whatever reason, just aren't going to write you a check?"
When asked if he has any big plans for the Web site or the business, Zirinsky is noncommittal.
"We're doing twenty percent a year and that's just fine. We don't need to double. We've got a nice, slow, consistent, manageable growth rate, and we're just going to stick with that. With the number one rating on Google, how much better is it going to get?" he says.
MEDmarketplace.com: Using Color and Design to Attract Attention
Vincent "Vinny" Baratta, the president and co-founder of MEDmarketplace.com, knows medical equipment. His grandfather ran a pharmacy and medical supply store and many members of his family went on to become doctors. Baratta himself grew up in the business, working in his grandfather's store and eventually creating a leading retail medical equipment chain, Homecare America.
He loves the business and loves helping customers find what they need.
Working out of his store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Baratta had a constant stream of elderly customers and their family members coming in and asking questions. After listening to a large number of these customers ask what to do with their or a relative used medical equipment (typically walkers, wheelchairs, and commodes), Baratta and his Web-savvy younger cousin, John Michael Baratta, or J.M., got the idea of creating an online marketplace for buying and selling used medical equipment.
"I was looking to really give a non-technical individual, a senior or someone who's not used to the Internet, an easy way to list their product," explains the senior Baratta. "The most frustrating thing about being on the Web is just clicking through and figuring out, 'Where do I go next?' I wanted to provide a medium where people could buy and sell used medical equipment at a very reasonable price and get a thirty-day listing and not have to deal with an auction."
Think of MEDmarketplace.com as a Craigslist for used medical equipment. The company holds no inventory, merely acting as a marketplace for buyers and sellers, though it also provides lots of useful information for customers.
"The idea was to build something that was not going to break the bank and going to be informative, knowledgeable, easy to use, kind of colorful, and [address] the scope of products that [our customers want to buy and sell]."
Unlike PEMED's Mark Zirinsky, the two Barattas immediately hired a premier Web design and development company, Random Access, also of Fort Lauderdale. Random Access built the backbone and J.M. took care of the rest. (J.M. is also in charge of all daily Web site management.)
"It cost over $50,000, and it was a great investment," states Vinny Baratta. "We're up month over month on sales, on traffic, on hits. Everything is growing in the right direction. And that's been consistent all the way through. We focused on the Internet, to get the best content, and to get great organic rankings. And I think we've accomplished that."
MEDmarketplace.com also has a three-year plan, which the Barattas created about a year ago. The first goal was to get search engine ranking and placement, which they accomplished, recently supplanting PEMED as the number one listing on Yahoo! (On Google MEDmarketplace.com is consistently in the top five.)*
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| MEDmarketplace, in comparison to PEMED, uses a much more advanced design and layout. It, also, is enjoying robust growth in the used medial supplies marketplace. |
The next big leap, which they are about to take, is to launch a major print, public relations, and media advertising campaign to make MEDmarketplace a household name. In the meantime, the Barattas are constantly coming up with new ways to make the MEDmarketplace.com experience as pleasant as possible.
"Now you can translate the site into nine languages," says Vinny Baratta. "And eventually it's going to go to multiple currencies. We want to make the experience, whether it's translation, currency, or shipping, as easy as possible between the buyer and seller."
The Expert Weighs In
Frank Farris, the founder and CEO of Atlanta-based DeepBlue, an award-winning Web design, development, and consulting business, knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn't on the Web. Farris calls it "presence." On the Web it means establishing your identity, differentiating yourself from the competition, letting people know who you are, and establishing a solid connection with your target audience.
"The most important thing is having a great product," explains Farris discussing the features of a good e-commerce site. After that come ease of use and a nice, clean design. (Farris is an advocate of the KISS rule - keep it simple, stupid.)
"A good Web site gives you a competitive advantage," he continues. "It is a powerful marketing tool. It shows you are serious about who you are. A good Web site can dramatically increase sales while a poorly executed site can cast your business in a negative light."
While acknowledging that both PEMED and MEDMarketplace have to deal with "a vast product category," Farris says that MEDMarketplace "does a good job of organizing. Its use of graphical callouts on the home page incorporates color to direct traffic to specific areas of the site. The design follows the 'Z' format for the most part, a tool used by artists and print designers to maximize well-documented eye-tracking knowledge. The typical user will start at the upper left when coming to a site. Having the logo here ensures brand recognition. Next, the user follows a straight line to the right. Having the primary navigation here ensures effective navigation. Next, the user follows an imaginary 'Z' to view the rest of the content, which for this site includes the callouts and finishing up with product categories.
The primary navigation is user friendly and extremely intuitive. Using words such as 'sell, 'browse' and 'contact' leaves no question about where the user is going."
As for PEMED, although the company offers a good range of products at a good (or unbeatable) price, and clearly has built up a solid customer base, Farris is not a big fan of frames or the online catalog approach. He believes the company could do more, if not to increase sales to make sure it didn't lose any.
"Companies that are too complacent risk losing their customers," explains Farris. "Companies that are afraid of being complacent succeed."
* As of June 6, 2005.
Jennifer Lonoff Schiff (www.schiffandschiff.com) writes about business and technology and is a contributor for ECommerce-Guide.com.
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