Today, instead of giving people a lot of choices and taking orders, we are beginning to serve customers better by getting to know them. A company that knows what I want has a great advantage over a company that offers me a slew of choices and makes me sift through them. At Manheim Interactive, our customers are used-car dealers, people who are not typically found at the bleeding edge of technology. They treat the Web like any other tool that, if used correctly, will make or save them money. If it doesn't address their needs today, they have no interest in it whatsoever.
Specific information becomes increasingly more important the older a car gets.
After three years on the road, no two cars are exactly the same. That question of accountability and responsibility is one we grapple with constantly. We know that we're not going to be able to plop our whole assortment of goods, from toilet paper to tires, onto a Web site and effectively serve anyone. So we're concentrating on several small, incremental steps. We started by selling electronics online because we knew that Walmart could offer more valuable information about technology through our Web site than we could through our sales associates, who often don't have specialized knowledge about electronic goods.