Thanks Ellwood Epps

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I was at the Orillia Gun Club today trying to set up my new Weaver 5-15 X50 tactical on my .223 Rem and was having a terrible time. A fellow that looked pretty familiar but I didn't know why offered to assist and had a look at it and then said walk it over to the shop which is Epps and he'd have a look at it for me.

Turns out he was familiar to me because he is KEVIN and works at EPPS I just didn't put 2 and 2 together. It turns out Kevin was on his own time made the offer to assist and still came to the shop and bore sited the scope for free and gave me tons of good advice on reloading for my rifle.

Kudos to Kevin and Ellwood Epps. Kevin we usually go for Breakfast to the north after shooting, I owe you at least a breaky.

Garry S
 
Winchester-1897 said:
I was at the Orillia Gun Club today trying to set up my new Weaver 5-15 X50 tactical on my .223 Rem and was having a terrible time. A fellow that looked pretty familiar but I didn't know why offered to assist and had a look at it and then said walk it over to the shop which is Epps and he'd have a look at it for me.

Turns out he was familiar to me because he is KEVIN and works at EPPS I just didn't put 2 and 2 together. It turns out Kevin was on his own time made the offer to assist and still came to the shop and bore sited the scope for free and gave me tons of good advice on reloading for my rifle.

Kudos to Kevin and Ellwood Epps. Kevin we usually go for Breakfast to the north after shooting, I owe you at least a breaky.

Garry S
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Garry:

All you owe me is a 100 yard target with 5 bullseyes!

No problem at all. Hope it all worked out for you.

Cheers!
 
Epps in person is great. I just bought my Daniel Defense MilSpec+ M4A1 from them, and I was very happy with the people and the transaction.

Although this has been covered before, the only problem that remains with their website is not having photos of the firearms. People having to go through the extra step of having to ask for photos and then wait a day is just bad business; I'll never understand why you would put your customers in a position where they have to do more work.

People see a firearm on your website that they're not 100% sure what it looks like, and end up Googling it to see what it looks like, and that takes them to another website like Cabela's or another shop that has pics of it, and then you've lost them.
 
Yes I love Ellwood epps for the inventory but I also wish I would have seen pics as I ordered a silver boy and every pic I saw it was tapped for a scope mine wasn't a little disappointed but still a nice rifle
 
Petamocto said:
Epps in person is great. I just bought my Daniel Defense MilSpec+ M4A1 from them, and I was very happy with the people and the transaction.

Although this has been covered before, the only problem that remains with their website is not having photos of the firearms. People having to go through the extra step of having to ask for photos and then wait a day is just bad business; I'll never understand why you would put your customers in a position where they have to do more work.

People see a firearm on your website that they're not 100% sure what it looks like, and end up Googling it to see what it looks like, and that takes them to another website like Cabela's or another shop that has pics of it, and then you've lost them.
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Actually, this works to our benefit more often than you might think. By having the customer visit the manufacturer's website, several things happen:

1) The customer is able to ensure that they are looking at the right firearm for them. Case in point today, one customer thought he was buying a Daniel Defense DDM18 rifle in flat dark earth finish, when in fact the model we have in stock is an all-black gun with FDE hand guards over the quad rails only. Would a picture on the website have help here? Most certainly. But in the end he found an entirely different rifle in which he was interested, after viewing other variants on the DD website, and he chose to order that model instead. Win-Win for everyone involved.

2) The customer is able to price-shop for the item he is seeking. Epps will match prices on any competitor's product providing that exact same item is in stock at any competitor's warehouse under the advertised price. In one case just last week or so, a customer was looking to purchase a Remington 887 Nitro Tactical, but when they price-compared the Benelli M4 between our store and a competitor, we matched their price and ended up selling him a much better firearm. Again, Win-Win all around.

As we have discussed ad nauseum in various other posts around these boards, our inventory volume is both too large and has too rapid a turn-over to maintain a full library of images of every firearm we carry. Yes, pictures would be helpful in some cases, but the workload and time required to create, update and maintain an image library of our inventory would take 3 or 4 employees to be a current and useful offering.

We prefer to have our customers contact our store with any inquiries or questions they might have. These boards are full of grips and complaints about customer service (or a lack thereof) from businesses, but our model allows and encourages communication between clients and our sales staff.

Unfortunately, you can't please ALL of the people ALL of the time.
 
Harrier, you're correct that you can't please everyone all of the time, but do you at least realize that you're practically the only major seller in Canada that doesn't have pictures up? Does that not tell you anything? What I think you're missing is that most people don't necessarily care about the specific firearm they're getting, so much as they just want to see a picture of the type of firearm you're selling.

So if you get a crate of 50 SKSs in, and they're all the same, you can just copy paste that one phone into all of them.

You can keep arguing with all of your customers begging for photos, but what kind of seller does that make you?

As I've said before, you need to go to a basic Marketing 101 class and you'll see that the Day 1 lesson of selling things to people is that you need to identify what people want and then give it to them. You have dozens of dozens of people telling you that they think you're being dumb not to have pictures (representing hundreds of customers who aren't bothering to write you), and yet you still refuse to listen to us.

I have bought a lot of things from you, and I like to support local, but I am honestly getting to the point where I am so upset at your refusal to listen to your customers' demands that you are not where I am going to shop anymore. I have already spent over $3k at your store, but just for example I want to buy a S&W500, and I want to buy a Benelli shotgun soon, and I am going to go elsewhere now because of you being stubborn.

How much is putting photos up on your website worth? Because I'm telling you that just in my sales alone that is going to cost another $3k. There are many more like me, so feel free to keep thinking you're right, and we'll keep buying elsewhere.
 
Petamocto said:
Harrier, you're correct that you can't please everyone all of the time, but do you at least realize that you're practically the only major seller in Canada that doesn't have pictures up? Does that not tell you anything? What I think you're missing is that most people don't necessarily care about the specific firearm they're getting, so much as they just want to see a picture of the type of firearm you're selling.

There are many more like me, so feel free to keep thinking you're right, and we'll keep buying elsewhere.
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And we'll keep doing business the way that has been working quite well for us up to and including today.

That's not arrogance, by the way, just a simple fact. Our website is incredibly busy, and nets us more than 60% of our daily sales WITHOUT PHOTOGRAPHS.

Case in point: I put a Beretta Model 71 pistol up for sale on our website at 9.30 AM this morning. Less than 5 minutes later I received a telephone call from a customer interested in buying the gun, but when I would not throw in spare magazines, he decided to think about it a bit longer.

Within an hour of that call, I received an E-mail from another customer who placed the gun on layaway, sight unseen.

Two hours later, another E-mail from another customer looking to purchase that same gun. Alas, it was already sold to the previous customer.

All with no photos.

But as we have noted in several conversations, customers are always free to request pictures from our secondary E-mail address, photos@ellwoodepps.com at any time.

And as for your claim that "people don't necessarily care about the specific firearm they're getting, so much as they just want to see a picture of the type of firearm you're selling", that statement is far from the mark. Ask our photographer how specific the requests are for the pictures he offers. Customers ask for photos of SPECIFIC firearms, showing SPECIFIC features of those firearms -- markings, internal conditions, stock conditions, sights, repair marks, weathering . . . the list goes on. I would counter your claim by suggesting that customers who do request pictures of our firearms ABSOLUTELY want images of specific examples, not generic broad-sweeping photographs of our general merchandise.

Yes, it would be nice to have pictures on our website, but as we have already explained in previous postings, this is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Our inventory is simply too large, and our turn-over times are generally too rapid to make that process viable. Not to mention what size the website would become, and the nightmare it would create for downloading and viewing the site on all but the fastest Internet connections. Nor the manpower it would require to take those thousands of photographs, process them, and post them on the website --- all before the firearms being photographed have already been sold.

Your advice to post pictures of just one SKS when we get 50 or so guns in stock at one time will not alleviate the situation at all. Stop by the store sometime and listen to the customers who ask to see 4 or 5 or 6 SKS rifles because they want to pick "the one in the best condition". Or put up a picture of one Browning Citori shotgun and listen to the customers who want to see 3 or 4 examples so they can pick the nicest wood. Or how about those customers who ask to see 2 different Savage Axis rifles because "one might be better than the other"!?! (synthetic stocks, really???)

Thank you for your invitation to attend a Marketing 101 class, but I have taken part in several of these seminars over the 30 years I have been in the retail business. I have even hosted several marketing meetings at different positions I have held throughout my career.

Salesmanship is not just about showing the product. A true salesman uses his knowledge of the wares he is selling to address his customer's needs and concerns, then offers responses and suggestions based upon the information presented by the customer, and in the end, matches a product to the customer's requirements. That product might not even be the same product the customer first came to the store with the intention to buy. After all, retail selling is a fluid and ever-changing art form. The displaying portion of any sale is the EASY part.

The website is not personally mine to modify. The management at Epps feels that our customers are well serviced by the site as it now stands, and the volume of business we deal with on a daily basis seems to support that claim. Take a look at the number of boards and posts on this site that repeatedly claim how busy our store is on any given day, and I believe those facts speak for themselves.
 
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I'm not saying that there's nothing good about your store, and of course I agree with you that there are many good things about it.

However, your position that you would not sell even more product with photos is absolutely false. It's like saying your car is fast enough and you're happy with it, and trying to convince me that a turbo wouldn't make it go even faster.

You think I'm telling you that your store or business model is crap, but I'm not. I'm telling you that if you had pics up you'd sell that much more.

Of course you get guns that you sell right away, but your website is also full of firearms that have been there for years. I can understand maybe not having the time to put new specific photos up if you're selling some models immediately, but how could it hurt to not at least put photos of of the things that have been there forever, like the Colt Python set?

Certainly your decision to make, and if you're okay with good enough, then I guess I'm not going to convince you otherwise. But if you measured your online sales every month, and added photos of everything you had, I can absolutely guarantee you that you would see a significant jump in sales. Not a few more guns per month, but I'd be willing to bet your sales would go up 20% or more.
 
Petamocto said:
I'm not saying that there's nothing good about your store, and of course I agree with you that there are many good things about it.

However, your position that you would not sell even more product with photos is absolutely false. It's like saying your car is fast enough and you're happy with it, and trying to convince me that a turbo wouldn't make it go even faster.

You think I'm telling you that your store or business model is crap, but I'm not. I'm telling you that if you had pics up you'd sell that much more.

Of course you get guns that you sell right away, but your website is also full of firearms that have been there for years. I can understand maybe not having the time to put new specific photos up if you're selling some models immediately, but how could it hurt to not at least put photos of of the things that have been there forever, like the Colt Python set?

Certainly your decision to make, and if you're okay with good enough, then I guess I'm not going to convince you otherwise. But if you measured your online sales every month, and added photos of everything you had, I can absolutely guarantee you that you would see a significant jump in sales. Not a few more guns per month, but I'd be willing to bet your sales would go up 20% or more.
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The problem is. There are a very large number of people still using dialup to access the page. And having 5 or 6 pictures each a meg or so would create havoc for those people. As it is right now. The email for pictures works very well. And people get the pictures they want instead of a generic picture.

And as harrier stated the majority of guns priced properly on the site generaly sell within the day they are posted. Also they bring in dozens of guns a day. It would take 3 or more people to take the pictures of all the guns coming in. And likely to have them sold before the pictures are taken which is a waste of time from a management point of view.
 
I actually enjoy calling in to ask about whatever product I'm looking for. It's nice to have that human element in today's anti social age. I always get more info than I'm looking for, and usually end up buying more than I had in mind, but that's ok. I guess I miss the old days. Don't ever change
 
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