PayPal Stories Archive

Steve Douge: Hardware Sales, located in Bellingham, Washington, is a family owned business that was founded in 1962. We have one massive physical retail store, it literally takes up four city blocks, and we have 120 employees at that location. I joined the company in 2006 and launched the online division for the company. In 2017, the online division of Hardware Sales grew to be larger than the rest of the company -- evidence that ecommerce is growing rapidly. Recently, we launched a second warehouse location specifically to store goods for our ecommerce division. We have really unique goods and long tail items, which makes us very competitive. We have about 150,000 different products at our retail store, and just for comparison, other major hardware stores carry about 40,000 to 50,000 products.

 

SD: I came to Hardware Sales via the acquisition of my company, Titan-Bay, which was actually one of Hardware Sales’ suppliers. I was brought on to start the online division for Hardware Sales.

 

SD: My time in the retail industry has taught me that things change very quickly and you need to stay ahead of things if you want to remain competitive. For 56 years, Hardware Sales was a physical-only retailer and they were doing really well. Soon after I joined and started the online division, online sales surpassed physical sales. That was representative of the industry at large -- retail was quickly moving online. We took a lot of steps to remain competitive. We focused on lean manufacturing and spent a lot of time eliminating irrelevant processes and waste, which allowed us to move more quickly and be competitive globally.

 

SD: As far as brick and mortar retail, customers have gotten a lot more savvy in terms of price -- they oftentimes compare prices before they come into the store. But obviously most retailers would prefer not to compete on price. If you don’t want to have to compete on price, it’s important to have a large selection of unique products that sets you apart. Many times customers go into a retail store and don’t find the products they want. Then they go online and find what they’re looking for and never want to go back to a brick and mortar store. So, for a physical retailer to stay competitive, they need to have a large selection of goods. In addition, at our physical store, we have very knowledgeable staff, which also keeps us competitive. Many customers want to be able to ask questions and get advice from staff in person, so it’s important for physical retailers to have knowledgeable staff on hand.

 

In terms of online shopping, ecommerce used to be all about price. Now we’re seeing that it’s really all about convenience. So if you’re an online business, it’s important to keep that in mind.

 

Finally, consumers are increasingly using mobile to shop and transact -- but only when they actually trust the site or know they’re protected through their payment method. We just replatformed our ecommerce site so it’s responsive and more mobile friendly.

 

SD: Until recently, we didn’t even have an online division or ecommerce site. Our physical retail store has been around for 56 years, but in just 12 years, our online division surpassed our physical retail division in terms of sales. Both our retail and online divisions have been doing well, but online has been growing much faster.

 

SD: We started selling internationally back in 2006. We knew that, because it’s complicated to start selling across borders, many of our competitors weren’t doing it, and we knew it would be a strong competitive advantage for us. It has since been a very successful part of our business, as many of our customers buy online from overseas. We knew that selling overseas meant that we would open up our store to a much larger global customer base, and that’s exactly what happened.

 

SD: We use PayPal as a method of payment across several of the channels where we sell, and it’s actually the preferred method of payment on our website. PayPal is great for businesses. Most people don’t understand that when a consumer initiates a chargeback -- the merchant ends up having to pay for it. PayPal is a great partner to us because they actually help us prevent fraud and chargebacks in the first place -- unlike other methods of payment. PayPal is also great for consumers, and makes it really seamless and secure for people to make purchases across millions of merchant sites -- without having to worry about whether the website is secure. PayPal is better for both the buyers and the seller.

 

SD: A lot of people and businesses spend too much time thinking about something, like expanding their business to sell cross borders, but not enough time actually doing it. Oftentimes people are afraid to just do something and end up taking too long to do it. My advice would be that once you research something and you know it’s the right thing for your business, just do it. This is the case for many things, including starting your business and selling internationally.