Journal-Sentinel Article
Ben Janssen and his Appleton-based NexStep Inc. operate on a fairly simple premise.
"You don't have to remember who we are, you just have to remember what you want to buy," Janssen said. "That's our philosophy and it seems to be working out so far."
His company is built around product-specific websites and Internet addresses. "What we did was try to focus on generic, market-branded domain names," he said.
The business, which consists of six people and 25 websites, is growing and will be moving to larger quarters in Little Chute next month.
His storefront consists of websites. There is no brick and mortar and no geographic boundaries. That allows him to sell snow blowers to people in Russia and log splitters to people in Sweden. "Our customers are all over the place," Janssen said.
The company is one of many for whom the Internet has become the center of commerce, where barriers to entry are low, customer service is paramount and having the right combination of words in a Web page address drives customer traffic.
When torrential rains fell across parts of the Midwest and South this summer, NexStep's website waterremoval.com/">waterremoval.com saw business spike.
When tornadoes marched across parts of the South and Midwest this spring and summer - toppling trees like they were toothpicks - NexStep's logsplitter.com/">logsplitter.com saw traffic pick up.
And when heavy snowstorms shut down huge portions of the East Coast last winter, Janssen's snow-blower.com/">snow-blower.com sold out of its inventory.
"We're a distributor of a bunch of different lines of products and we have been for years," Janssen said.
His sites include chippershredders.com; gardentillers.com; hedgetrimmers.com; zeroturnmowers.com and lawntrimmers.com.
The brands he sells include Troy-Bilt, Earthquake and Mantis.
Doing business online
The company represents a continuing trend toward doing business online.
As sure as there was a dot-com bust a few years back, there are also business models that survived and are being embraced by consumers.
"There is much less reticence to purchase online," said Sandra Bradley, director of the University of Wisconsin E-Business Consortium's Web and multichannel marketing area. "As a matter of fact, there is the expectation of being able to purchase online."
Competition is everywhere. Then again, so are Janssen's websites.
"It's all competitive," he said. "The thing is, we don't have to be competitive in just one market. We don't have to rely on one geographic marketplace and we don't have to rely on one product line, per se.
"We're open for business to the entire world."
Convenience and customer service are crucial to a successful online business, Bradley said.
"Specialty or niche items are clearly a growing area for Internet sales in particular, driven by ease of being found," she said. "Consumers want convenience. They don't want to search hard. They want easy to use, easy to find."
Doing business on the Internet has become accepted practice, she said.
"We're the e-business consortium and we're in our 13th year. Every year we talk about dropping the 'e' because it really is just business. And it's not 'Web marketing.' It's just marketing."
Customer support
Janssen, 31, and a business partner started the company in 2003. He bought out the partner's share soon after that, he said.
"We were primarily into building websites for other people," Janssen said. Then, he said, he realized he could build his own websites and use domain names that he already owned as part of the business.
He currently owns about 680 domain names.
In building the company, he says he has learned a few things.
"The best thing to do is answer the phone," he said. "Customer support is the biggest thing in this industry.
"When they call, they want someone to answer the phone."
Day to day, "It's about getting the correct lines of products and working with the manufacturers and getting relationships going before you can actually launch a web site," he said. "That relationship between you and the manufacturer is really important, especially in this industry because it's so fast-paced.
"A customer orders, they want their product, they want shipping information right away and you get the order to them as soon as you can."
Business continues to evolve, he said.
"We're still growing. Every year we get a little bit bigger, " Janssen said.
"The real action, I think, is yet to be seen," he added.
