Citrus-Lime: ‘Not fulfilling orders is a sure way to upset customers’

The season is in full swing with bike shops chock full of new gear. Grant Hadwin, head of sales and marketing for Citrus-Lime, tells BikeBiz how the firm can help keep summer running smoothly for retail…

BikeBiz: The trade is moving to its busiest season. What has Citrus-Lime got up its sleeve to help?
Grant Hadwin: Not fulfilling orders is a sure way to upset customers and lose revenue. Citrus-Lime’s understanding of cycle retail enables us to build systems that support the retail process from start to finish. Our customers use our Supplier Integration Module (SIM) to ensure stock availability is live, providing customers with accurate delivery times and also easily identifies when to restock. Our retail management system is also designed to ease the distribution of products, enabling fewer staff to work more efficiently. Our systems work in conjunction with MetaPack ensuring deliveries are guaranteed on time. It also allows for upselling to premium delivery options so there’s more flexibility to customers and a better margin for retailers.

With summer being so busy, marketing is easily overlooked. Can Citrus-Lime help there too?
With the continuing popularity in biking, summer is certainly a peak time for IBDs. Our Cloud Reporting supports this and identifies where and how customers are spending. Cloud Reporting can help with driving your marketing decisions, such as ‘who brought what and how’. Indeed marketing can be easily overlooked, however it is necessary to harness the surge of shoppers during this time. We offer key marketing services such as managed Google shopping campaigns, monthly newsletters, web affiliate marketing, SEO and remarketing. We recommend our managed Google Shopping as the first and most important marketing service as it can produce huge ROI of immediate effect.

Remarketing campaigns are a particular focus, our experienced design team produce attention-grabbing banners that build and reinforce the brand. Used correctly these can be very effective, after all for a large purchase such as a bike the customer will often think about the purchase and revisit the site later to make the purchase.

Can you explain how reports can help over the busy season?
As you know we’ve launched Cloud Reporting, a series of reports directly relevant to the cycle retailer. The stock turn optimiser and seasonal buying planner are two reports particularly relevant over the busy season. These look at how quickly stock turns and achieves profit. The reports are designed to assist you to identify which brands work best for you and generate the best achieved profit during the season, enabling you to react quickly to make decisions whilst demand is there. These reports can also be filtered by department, category and channel to provide the information you need. We have two versions of Cloud Reporting; the Professional Licence and the free Dashboard version. Existing customers should call us for their access and log in.

And more distributors have signed up to your Supplier Integration Module?
In the last few months we’ve signed up Extra, Mojo, Raleigh and so many more to join the list of 24 core industry suppliers. SIM is our dynamic link to suppliers with live stock level updates, product details, codes and prices. This means easier management and creation of products on the website and in-store, saving shops time. Also worth a mention is the stock check function, used to drive sales it is incredibly important and unique to Citrus-Lime. The integrated suppliers are so much easier to deal with, it really makes a difference to retailers and suppliers. Citrus-Lime is pioneering the technology in cycle by streamlining the supply chain.

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