Hoppings Softwood Products has launched a new service for merchant customers to enable them to incorporate a shop on their websites to sell its Q-Deck decking online.
A year ago, Hoppings began to offer merchants the option of creating a satellite website within their own for Q-Deck and its Q-Line softwood mouldings. For stockists which had not yet gone online, it undertook to create an entirely bespoke website under their own branding, incorporating the Hoppings pages within it “ at a fracton of the cost of developing their own site”.
In the latest move, following consultation with stockists, the company is now also offering to add a shopping cart facility to the Q-Deck section on merchants’ sites.
As well as customers who visit their site direct, merchants also have others driven to their online shop from the Q-Deck site, www.qualitydecking.co.uk.
“Our site, which gets up to 2,000 visitors a day, has a facility to direct them to their local stockist,” said Hoppings marketing and development director Adam Pulfer. “It opens a whole new channel of enquiries to them and delivers qualified decking leads.”
He added that merchants would also soon be able to put the Q-Line range into the online shop, and may ultimately be able to offer other products through it too.
Hoppings charges a fee for stockists for the new facility, and they also have to meet some free delivery and order confirmation criteria. But Mr Pulfer said it was already paying dividends for companies using it, quoting S& J Wackett Timber Merchants as saying it had “generated a lot of enquiries”.
So far 15 merchants’ Q-Deck shops are live, with another 14 expected to launch by Easter.
