After announcing early this year that the Masters hardware stores would offer an online product the company has now gone live with its website. Source: Power Retail
The new Masters online offer includes a large amount of editorial content for DIY customers.
Other competitors have been slow to reach the point of selling online, and the only e-commerce sites that offer this kind of product are only niche stores or eBay sellers.
It was probably assumed that the tools and trade materials categories simply wouldn’t fly online. Masters may prove that assumption wrong.
“I think you can sell virtually anything online these days – it’s all about convenience,” Clare Buchanan, Group Manager of Corporate Communications at Woolworths told Current.com.au in March.
“People may well come into the store and browse, but they want the convenience of then being able to go home and think about it, measure it and then buy it online and have it delivered straight to their house.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of shopping either in store or online, it’s about how the two integrate together.”
It appears that www.masters.com.au checks all the boxes as far as online retailing practices are concerned. The site loads quickly and has strong navigation features.
The site’s search function returns results and suggestions even if it can’t find the exact term entered.
Masters has even produced a host of DIY information, tips and tricks via an on-site blog, providing the level of editorial content that is beginning to prove so profitable for any online store.
There is a customer support hotline and an extensive FAQ section, which provides delivery information among other things. Masters even points out that it offers a ‘Click then Collect’ option so that customers can purchase on-site and pickup in-store.
One interesting feature is that prices are not automatically revealed on the website. Instead, customers are required to input a postcode before they can find out how much something will cost.
This is less likely to do with calculating shipping costs instead it is probably a method of finding further information about the customers visiting the site, without requiring them to sign up and log in.
