RTO Online adding B2B marketplace
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, April 14, 2002
SCOTT CITY, Mo. — RTO Online, a fast-growing Web site for the rent-to-own industry, is adding an online MarketPlace in which business-to-business e-commerce could be conducted.
The site would function as an online trade show, providing a place on the Internet for manufacturers, distributors and service providers to potentially reach thousands of buyers in the RTO industry.
"Our goal is to provide rent-to-own buyers an efficient platform to find and purchase new products and services," according to the RTO Online home page, which is at www.rtoonline.com.
Although the selling effort has just begun, RTO Online already has signed on eight vendors, including Simmons Bedding, and has requests from 52 other companies, said Roy Griffaw, press director for the site.
Vendors are being asked to buy their own pages in the RTO Online MarketPlace. Each vendor page will include a descriptive "story" about the company, up to six product photos with descriptions, a banner advertisement, and logo.
"We have learned by experience that this (story) format is more enjoyable for the reader," said Griffaw. "Articles of interest to the reader are called 'sticky' (because) the reader spends more time."
Griffaw founded the site in 1998 and launched it nationally two years later.
Costs to join the marketplace run between $500 and $1,400. A standard six-photo page layout with e-mail forms for directly contacting vendors costs $500 per year, while suppliers can have pages listed in more than one category at a rate of $300 per year per page.
Companies signing up for pages in more than one category are being offered 50% off the first year.
As of March, RTO Online was recording more than 75,000 hits per month and growing at a clip of about 15% per month, with visitors staying an average of 12 minutes each.
The site has members in 31 states and four countries.
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| Vendors can reach RTO buyers online through MarketPlace pages. |
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