Today I had a very interesting experience with my family. We wanted to take a day off and we had the simple plan of going fishing on a dock not far from where we live. My kids love fishing and we just made a short detour because me and my wife had been looking for a motorcycle to ride in the Florida sun and there was a good deal on Craigslist that we wanted to check out.
Yesterday I had found a post advertising a bike sold by a dealer, the price seemed very attractive as compared to other “used vehicles” and the picture was not too bad. So I called the seller, a mid-forty gentleman named David, he sent me more pictures of the bike via e-mail and told me all about it. But before the conversation was over, he also invited me to his virtual shop on eBay which had more inventory.
And there I found this beautiful black Vulcan Kawasaki in mint condition. He gave me a discounted price over the phone, if I bought it directly, and today we went to look at the bike in his location. We discovered it was a private house, a big single family home with a huge garage on a cul de sac. An elderly lady greeted our arrival, David was not there and neither was the black Vulcan, but four other bikes were nicely displayed in the garage.
The lady, of Hungarian origin, had recently moved to Florida from Ohio to live with his son David. She promoted David’s work but stating that he checked personally every single motorcycle before selling it and would never sell one that he was not personally satisfied with. Live promotion right there.
So I called again the number David had given me and we were guided to another location, a deposit of hidden to the side of US 19, where the Vulcan sitting was along with other vehicles.
It became very clear to me that David is running his whole retail business online and has no shop whatsoever. The bikes are displayed either in his home or in this industrial deposit and his customers are coming from anywhere, actually today he was waiting to deliver a Honda Goldwing to a customer arriving from Georgia.
He buys used bikes that people trade in for buying new Harley-Davidson models, so he gets them at a strong discount and is able to recondition them and resell them for a profit by just running all the show by himself out of Craigslist and eBay.
You can only find him online, the Internet serves all of his marketing needs, but he is a regular retailer with a very lean business model and the ability to offer great prices. And he is not a computer expert. I will probably buy from him because he delivered fast and excellent service, has very good prices and it is like buying from a private seller, while having the experience and the wider choice offered by a professional retailer. Focusing on a limited inventory and a very good knowledge of every single bike, he was able to create a very effective buying experience combining online marketing and offline negotiation.
Roberto Mazzoni is president of several international ventures specialized in personal branding, Web promotion, training and real estate. Also blogger, journalist, Web 2.0 fan.
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