SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — E-tique.org offers a growing library of QR coded product demo videos, which can be viewed by brick-and-mortar retail shoppers on their smart phones or E-tique’s QR code reader kiosks to possibly save sales on out-of-stock items.
“E-tique.org is an online presence built around the idea of shopping at an actual store — it’s shopping in-store, online,” E-tique.org President Donovan Green told XBIZ, noting that all of the items listed on the site are priced as they would be sitting on a store’s shelf.
Orders placed online — or at an E-tique kiosk — are drop-shipped nationwide and delivered to homes or at local adult stores for shoppers to pick up.
For more than a decade, Green also is the president and CEO of Santa Barbara Books, Inc., operating nine adult retail locations in California and Arizona. He said E-tique was born inside his brick-and-mortar locations with customers becoming aggravated while attempting to use QR technology to scan bar codes for better deals on adult products.
“We’re now using the QR codes that display demos of products to sell them from our locations, even though they’re not in stock,” Green said. “With the kiosk, it’s virtual shopping inside the stores.
“The kiosk gives stores the ability to not to lose a sale based on not having a product. You sign up as an E-tique retailer, train staff to use the online platform in stores to drop-ship customer orders — profits are retained by the stores.”
E-tique provides each store with a unique code that allows it to track its sales through E-tique, and will even pay commission to sales associates, Green said.
The basic kiosk features a QR code scanner and an all-in-one Dell computer. E-tique’s product demo video library can be accessed through the kiosk, and alternatively are offered singularly as QR codes that can be affixed to product packaging for store shelving for retailers that maintain an iPad or other video-enabled mobile device as a sales tool.
“We’ve installed kiosks at all of our locations and I’m noticing that the younger people are very receptive and not at all intimated,” Green said.
While several manufacturers offer ready-made product demos, including CalExotics, Sportsheets and Liberator, Green said he is looking to partner up with manufacturers to collaborate on product demos made for in-store marketing, and is currently working with BeaMonstar Products to create a promotional video for the company’s SexVoltz male enhancer.
“There are a lot of products in the novelty industry that simply cannot be thoroughly explained on a box,” Green said. “It could help a manufacturer show the many different ways to use their products, and expose shoppers to methods they would never have imagined on their own at home.”
According to Green, E-tique also serves manufacturers with analytic tools that communicate at which locations their QR codes where scanned. For more information, visit E-tique.org.
