Chicos y chicas, this last Friday we had a conversation with Alberto Torrón who created the website Todotaladros.com where you can buy drills, vacuum cleaners, meters and all sorts of professional tools that some really need and know how to use and others just find sexy to have at home and show off to their neighbours.
The idea came from a necessity, when the wife of one of the founders needed to get a job and contribute to the social insurance to get her retirement. Coming from a small village in Spain and seeing how expensive professional tools were, two guys then decided to create an online store in April 2010 after testing the model in eBay for a while. I have two comments here: first this reminds me of the Latin America culture where most of the business actually come from the necessity to get a job, my grandfather for example immigrated to Brazil and started selling fruits and then bought a gas station that he runs still today. Second, tools in Spain are really expensive, another day I had to buy some new light bulbs for my apartment here and while in a ordinary ferretería (where they sell this stuff here) one bulb was EUR 5 in the next store, a Chinese one, it was half the price (where do you think as a poor MBA student I got mine?)
Another thing that I liked about Alberto's approach was how specific he is. He has four different websites for selling tools and is very specific in each one of them. While this might sound a little bit weird since you have to analyze each store separately in the end the customer knows exactly what to find in each one of them and another lesson that I have from my web media class is that the more specific you're in Google Adwords the less you have to invest given the lower competition for your keywords. If you don't have a clue on what I'm talking about look for a Google Adwords Tutorial on Google search, if you plan to open an online business you'll end up having to use it one day.
Alberto commented about his purchasing approach that in my view is his most strategic element. He goes all over the Internet looking for the cheapest tools to buy, including international stores and resells them through his website. He is not only price competitive but fast, reliable and keeps things simple in his website using a open source platform that has the functionality that he needs and it's for free. According to him most physical stores in Spain don't have a website and buy only internally what makes them sell for more. He also commented about their approach of saying "Sorry, we don't have it" instead of the British approach "We'll look for it doesn't matter what" that he personally follows. Actually in my search for the light bulbs, besides having a higher price, the store I went to had only two bulbs while I needed four (guess what they told me?).
Well folks, this is a bit about the lecture that we had. I have many other things I wrote down in my paper notebook (I guess I'm the only one taking notes in a piece of paper in this class) but since it's a Saturday, and tomorrow will most likely rain, I'm now leaving to Parque del Retiro to debate by the lake the other take aways from this session, nos vemos allá!
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