When your business rolls out an Authorized Dealer Program (“ADP”), you will be establishing and enforcing rules for your resale partners to follow. But that doesn’t mean your ADP will put your company and your resellers in adversarial roles. In several ways, your program can benefit your resale partners, help enhance their businesses, and aligns your brand’s interests with theirs.
This is an important concept to understand because you will want to be able to articulate these benefits to would-be resale partners when your sales and business development teams communicate with them. In this short lesson, we will review some key points you can share with potential dealers to explain why joining your retail network is a smart move on their part.
Pro tip: Don’t assume your authorized dealers will know all of these benefits instinctively. Explain them to every new dealer when you invite them into the program.
4 Ways Resellers Can Benefit from Joining Your Authorized Dealer Program (ADP)
1. They will be associated with an exclusive brand, which can boost their own image.
When your retail partners can signal to consumers that they are among a small group of your trusted sellers (and we will discuss below how you can make that easy for them), your authorized dealers can boost their own brand’s image.
Contrast this with a product that any retailer can offer, and perhaps hundreds or even thousands do, and you can see how being an official “Authorized Dealer” of a trusted brand can enhance a retailer’s credibility with consumers.
In fact, the added customer trust that a retailer can generate as an authorized partner of your brand can actually carry over to the seller’s other inventory as well. Knowing that the retailer has earned your brand’s trust can make shoppers feel more comfortable doing business with the company in general.
2. They will know they have a brand partner looking out for their interests.
When retail partners sell the products of a brand that does not have an Authorized Dealer Program, retailers often find themselves in fierce competition with a large pool of other sellers, including many who have no relationship with the brand and don’t care about the customer experience they create when selling its products.
This makes it more difficult for a retailer to earn a margin it can be happy about. It also increases the odds the retailer will eventually find itself holding the inventory of a brand in decline. When brands allow their retail channel to become a free-for-all, their honorable retail partners suffer.
By establishing an ADP, you are creating a much safer environment for your dealers to acquire, hold, and sell your products. The program’s application process means your retail partners will have fewer competitors, and your enforcement of the program’s rules means they will have a brand they can be proud to carry.
3. They will be able to offer customers incentives that unauthorized sellers cannot.
Another benefit of joining your Authorized Dealer Program (and following its rules) is that it can allow a dealer to offer certain enhancements and incentives with your products that other retailers cannot.
For example, you can offer a warranty, a generous return policy, and other benefits for buying your product only through one of your authorized dealers. This gives your dealer partners another way to make their offerings more appealing to customers, which can help them increase sales and grow their own businesses.
4. They will be able to display another trust icon, which research shows can boost sales.
As we pointed out in Lesson 2, research cited in Forbes found that 75% of shoppers are more likely to feel comfortable doing business with a site displaying a trust icon. This makes perfect sense. With so many eCommerce sites and product listings on marketplaces such as Amazon, it can be difficult for consumers to know which retailers they can trust.
This leads to yet another way that retailers can benefit from joining an Authorized Dealer Program. The brand administering the program should offer its authorized dealers an icon that they can display on their site to show that they are a trusted source for purchasing their product.
Your ADP should include trust icons for all of your retail partners. Specifically, you will want to offer them a digital “Verified Authorized e-Tailer” badge, which they can place on all online advertisements, and product listings on their eCommerce websites.
Note: Your retailers might not be allowed to include their trust icons on internet marketplaces. Amazon, for example, does not allow this.
Being able to bolster their listings of your products with proof that they are an official part of your resale network can instantly help your dealers earn the trust of shoppers. Again, this can boost your retail partners’ credibility not only with regard to your brand’s products but with whatever else they are selling.
Pro tip: As we also noted in Lesson 2, your Verified Authorized e-Tailer badge cannot simply be a static icon your dealers paste online alongside your product listings. The badge itself should be a live link that a shopper can click and see a real-time verification that the retailer is, in fact, an official seller of your brand.