MobileToys.com a driving force

By MARY K. PRATT

BEVERLY _ MobileToys.com starts with a simple question: Know what fits in your car?

If you're the average customer, you'd have to answer, "No." Because unless you're a trained installer, chances are you don't what stereo or speakers or CD player is the best fit for your car.

But MobileToys.com makes this promise: "Tell us what you drive and we'll find the products that fit your vehicle."

Not only that, the company will find the right person to sell and install all your new toys - all with a few clicks of the mouse.

So, what exactly does MobileToys.com do?

MobileToys.com is a part of a new way of using the World Wide Web to make money. The Internet site is a bridge of sorts, an online middleman, that matches car owners looking for mobile electronics with retailers who sell and install the products.

MobileToys.com is part of the "clicks and bricks solution," according to Tony Frangiosa, president, chief information officer and founder of MobileToys.com. "We're not an e-tailor or a retailer."

MobileToys.com evolved from Sound Solutions. Sound Solutions, which was started in January 1989, provided businesses with software that helped them sell and properly install the right mobile electronics in vehicles.

"Sound Solution was looking for a consumer presence so we launched a Web site called MobileToys," said Frangiosa, who was executive vice president with the Danvers-based Sound Solutions. The Web site started in August 1998.

Today, MobileToys.com is based in the Cummings Center in Beverly. The company includes both the Web site and the software for mobile-electronics retailers.

While dot-com businesses have been having a rough time lately, the mobile electronics business is booming, with $14 billion spent in 1999 on products such as car stereos, CD players, car phones, speakers, amplifiers and global positioning systems and another $1.5 billion in installation services.

The average buyers of these products are 18- to 24-year-old males, although Frangiosa said MobileToys.com has a clientele that's "a little more educated, more affluent, a little older."

Linking retailers and consumers

This is how the site works: Dealers pay a fee to MobileToys.com to be represented on its Web site. Consumers then visit the Web site, looking for products and installation. MobileToys.com educates the consumer about what's available and then hooks that consumer up with a member retailer. Depending on what the consumer wants, the retailer might have just information available for the customer, or might sell the product to him or her, or might sell and install it as a package, Frangiosa said. A consumer can arrange what he or she wants for mobile electronics online and even set up an appointment for installation. That way, there's no browsing through showrooms and no waits for salespeople.

"That's what the Internet is about, convenience," Frangiosa added.

Most of the member retailers are independent stores or small chains, he said.

"They have more of a need for our services," he explained. "They don't have $1 million to spend on Web advertising, on structuring the Web site and everything that's needed for a successful Web presence."

Nearly 3,000 dealers nationwide were members of MobileToys.com as of October 2000, Frangiosa said.

Sound Installation in Lynn is one member, and owner Richard Basler said he can attest to the benefits of being part of the Web site.

"MobileToys gives me an avenue. It's obviously the technology age . People use the Internet to track down information," he said. "It's not like the old days when they used (411) information or the Yellow Pages."

Basler said he doesn't have the money or resources to develop his own Web site, "so right now MobileToys gives me the only recognition on the Internet."

Sound Installation gained about 20 customers through MobileToys, Basler said, which was enough to pay for the company's $500 fee for 2000. Basler also said that some of the customers came from communities where his traditional advertising doesn't reach.

Still, Basler doesn't see MobileToys.com as the main avenue for earning sales.

"MobileToys helps get them in the store," he said. "But once the customer is in the store, you still have to do work."

For the future

MobileToys.com still has work to do, too. ("The market has not been kind to dot-coms," Frangiosa said.)

The company has formed partnerships, what Frangiosa called "strategic alliances," with other Web sites to help attract more customers to MobileToys.com. One such partner is AutoByTel.com, a top-ranked automotive Web site. Like other online partnerships, there is a revenue-sharing agreement to fund the partnership that links one Web site to the other, Frangiosa said.

As of fall 2000, MobileToys.com had an average of about 30,000 visitors a month, with visitors spending an average of 17 minutes at the site.

Frangiosa said he hopes to have more than 300,000 visitors a month in 2001. Features such as a shopper assistant, called the "value valet," are designed to keep consumers at the site by making it easy to use.

But MobileToys.com needs to make sure consumers nationwide know its name if it wants to draw business, said Patricia Sendall, associate professor of management information systems at Merrimack College. Sendall has an expertise in e-commerce.

And, she said, getting its name out will take old-fashioned marketing skills. Print and radio ads along with word of mouth are needed, Sendall explained, "to get the consumer to come to you."

Competition is fierce on the Internet, with hundreds of thousands of sites competing for consumer dollars. Sendall said MobileToys.com needs to develop what she called "stickiness," a quality that draws Web surfers to it, the same way Yahoo has pull on the World Wide Web.

"The thing about that is Yahoo has a Web presence, they have a name," she said. "But MobileToys isn't well-known yet."

MobileToys.com also has to build its network of dealers to ensure that consumers everywhere can find one close by, she said. "They have a lot of work to get those dealers to subscribe, and if they can do that, they can probably survive."

Frangiosa is confident that MobileToys has what it takes to be successful.

"We're not turning a profit today," he said, "but our projections show we will be soon."