Online channel Hoppings

The overall decking market plateaued around 2008 but Hoppings Softwood Products has managed to maintain very similar sales volumes to the previous three years through consistency of quality and supply, product innovation and marketing support for our retail customers. Sales of decking represent 30% of Hoppings' overall turnover, with the main tranche being in mouldings and PSE sections.

Our Q-Deck range has been established for over 13 years and is available from more than 230 stockists nationwide - predominately timber and builders merchants. Q-Deck products are positioned at the top end of the pre-treated, certified, European redwood sector and decking boards are treated with Tanalised E Extra including a water-repellent additive that provides added protection from the elements both at point of sales and in situ.

The most recent addition to the range is Lyptus decking, a truly sustainable hardwood decking board grown in plantations in South America and harvested within 20 years. Prior to this, Q-Grip Strips and Q-Grip decking were added to the range. Grip Strip is an elegant retrofit insert that can be applied to two styles of decking boards within the Q-Deck range, providing allied sales opportunities for the merchant. Q-Grip decking has built-in slip resistance in the form of resin bound aggregates and is mainly used in the commercial sector.

As Steve Young, director of the Timber Decking & Cladding Association, has reported, there has been an unsurprising trend for some retailers to try to stimulate sales by offering lower grades of decking but Q-Deck hasn't been affected to date and won't follow suit as the brand stands for quality. Plus, there comes a point where a product simply isn't fit for the intended use, which could damage the market if promoted incorrectly.

Sales of Q-Deck hardwood decking are a fraction of our softwood equivalents but, as the decking market matures, consumers will want more choice and some individuality, which is why we plan to continue to develop the premium end of our range.

For many years we have wanted to see our products being sold online but not via the mass online hubs some of our competitors have adopted. Decking isn't actually that easy to sell over the web unless you are targeting sales at the cheap end of the market. Thus, way back in 2008, we started formulating plans of how we could sell Q-Deck products online without skirting around our loyal retail customer base.

Retail partners
We adopted a simple strategy of entering the online sales channel with the services of our retail customers as partners. We take the hassle away from our customers wanting to sell online by providing all the support and information they need. Essentially, we support them by packaging our Q-Deck range into a satellite website with shopping cart and this gets embedded into their own website. If they don't have a website then we can build one for them.

However, all shops need customers and the strategy fails without the ability to generate online customers. When a merchant becomes a Q-Deck online partner they get dynamically listed on www.qualitydecking.co.uk and www.decking.co.uk, Hoppings' virtual salesmen whose goal is to attract over 180,000 unique visitors in 2013.

Retail outlets carefully design and lay out their shops to encourage people to buy goods and website design should be seen as no different. Before launching the online partnering strategy we had to give www.qualitydecking.co.uk a facelift and spent months redesigning many pages to be more appealing, more intuitive and easy to use. This redesign tracked through to our partners Q-Deck online shops.

Bringing the skill and service of our retail partners to the online channel in the way we have hasn't affected any buying structures already in place between us and has had minimal operational impact on Hoppings. It truly is a win-win for all parties because we've provided the consumer with awareness and convenience by enabling them to buy Q-Deck online while maintaining the reassurance of dealing with a local supplier.

Devising and formulating this awardwinning strategy [Hoppings won 2012 TTJ Awards for Excellence in Marketing and for Website of the Year] stemmed from setting long-term aims from which the team start to assess how to go about achieving them using marketing analysis techniques. Ultimately it is wise to decide what will be best for your company in the long term and to do this effectively takes a lot of thought and discussion both internally and externally. Hoppings is very aware that some sections of the industry and even other industries will follow our essentially simple strategy but not without a huge amount of thought, effort, work and, most importantly, co-operation.

At Timber Expo we showed our online partners how our e-commerce strategy is being developed still further to allow them to add their other building products to the facility. If you are a merchant interested in attending a Hoppings e-commerce open day in November please e-mail info@hoppings.co.uk and we will provide further details.