Every day, home appliances companies get challenged by their customers. Today’s clients want a great product, that meets their needs, without breaking the bank.
As a result, induction cooktop designers challenge their own budget lines, seeking for every detail that’ll help them create cost-effective products, aiming at full customer satisfaction.
To help you create the next best-selling low-cost induction hob, our experts unveil here
5 ways to lower your induction hob’s price, without creating a product that’ll look cheap or fail on this highly competitive market of yours.
LOOK FOR HIDDEN PRICES INSIDE YOUR MANUFACTURERS’ OFFERS
Let’s face it: induction hob manufacturers located in low-cost countries, such as China, can seem very attractive, from an economical point of view. So when cooktop designers aim at creating a competitive product, it can seem like the ideal solution.
But have you thought about all the hidden prices inside those low-cost offers? When establishing your budget,
look for every additional cost that those kind of offers can induce, such as:
- Payment by letter of credit, that often occurs in long-distance international trade, and that may slow down the project’s process.
- Custom duties that can surprise you if you don’t include them as a budget line from the start.
- Less agile production lines, which aren’t able to react as fast as you’d like to if something goes wrong during the creation process.
- Longer deadlines for deliveries, but also all the issues that can occur in this long-distance process, and upon which you won’t be able to really act. And can a late penalty really make up for a sale that was lost due to a missing item?
- Breakdown costs. Some low-budget factories may deliver products with a high breakdown rate, resulting in significant repair costs.
- Your time. Because time you spend trying to make sure your order will be delivered the right way represents time you won’t spend on developing your business.
In fact, a really low-budget induction cooktop manufacturer will be able to establish your budget with you, taking into account every detail of your conception pricing. Look for the perfect ally to design and conceive your product, that will help you do so.
SEEK FOR ECONOMIES OF SCALE
The glass-ceramic market is quite monopolistic. The raw material’s price depends a lot on how much volume you buy. The same applies to the electronics you need to create an induction hob.
To conceive a really low-budget hob, you need to find the manufacturer that’ll make
economies of scale, by buying large volumes to their partners. Those kinds of synergies make some providers more competitive than low cost countries, thanks to the volume of raw material they buy.
At
ARPA’s, we are able to offer excellent prices, thanks to the volume of products we conceive each year: we have an economy of scales, that benefits all of our customers, from the ones that want to conceive the smallest batch to the biggest distributor.
TAKE INTO ACCOUNT USER EXPERIENCE FROM THE START
Let’s say you designed a highly competitive induction hob, and put it on the market… but you realize it doesn’t meet your customers’ needs. What happens then? The truth can be harsh to admit: the cooktop will cause customer service issues, and, after its (bad) reputation is set, won’t even be bought at all.
Taking into account your product’s user experience from the start of your cooktop project can help your product be more cost-effective in the end. This may seem like a basic advice, but taking into account UX is not always
top-of-mind to every manufacturer.
That is why you need to seek for an OEM that:
- Conceives its products based on a real value analysis. Sometimes, the saying “less is better” is the best way to design a competitive product – and how can you really make a value analysis when you don’t understand the consumers’ perception, as can’t some OEMs ?
- Uses the Design Thinking technique to generate innovative ideas, even for a low-cost project. This technique helps you and your designer/manufacturer to seek for the most striking ideas, that’ll immediately appeal to your target-audience.
- Has set an operational excellence process, that makes its factories more agile, and more focused on user experience.
- Keeps an eye on your marketing, by customizing your hob’s every detail, and make it match your audience’s needs. Can your OEM help you design your product’s packaging? Or find the best design to stick to the actual induction hob trends?
To put it in a nutshell, your partner in creating your low-cost induction cooktop needs to take part in your commercial success from the start, to avoid user experience issues.
FIND A PARTNER THAT TAKES CARE OF YOUR LOGISTICS…
A cooktop project’s budget cannot make without significant logistics costs. Where will you stock your products? How will your supply chain be managed? Some of those questions can make your product’s final cost higher than expected.
For instance, some induction cooktop manufacturers take care on their own of your stocks, allowing you to save budget on such a crucial issue.
Others make sure
the production and logistics of your products perfectly match your supply chain model.
By making sure your OEM’s logistics match yours, you can reduce your inventory costs thanks to:
- Proximity. With local stocks, no need to order your cooktops by container, and your products’ lead time is shorter. Plus this local logistics method can help you reduce your product’s ecological footprint, meeting your CSR duties.
- Small batch production. Many low-cost countries won’t start their production batch under a consequent amount of pieces. Some (such as ARPA) allow you to start it as low as 34 pieces, making it easier to stock your products in an agile way.
… AND OF YOUR AFTER SALES CUSTOMER SERVICE
As a conscious home appliances brand, you know as much as we do the after sales customer service take a large part into your products’ budget lines.
Did you know some OEM also cover, inside their initial invoices, some of those after sales budget lines, that may lower your final product’s prices when taken into account from the start? Some can add to their prices crucial elements, such as:
- A full technical documentation, enabling the customers to be more autonomous when using their induction cooktop.
- A training of your quality and after sales teams, for them to become experts at answering the final customers’ wishes and questions.
- A precise traceability of your products, by serial number, making it easier to manage the customer issues that emerge after the sale.
- A customer service hotline, to deal with customer issues after the launch, without deploying your own teams on the matter.
- A follow-up with the customer’s satisfaction, to evaluate how your product performs when it’s out on the market.
- An easy access to spare parts, which other low-cost factories don’t take into account, adding another expensive (and sometimes unexpected) line to your budget, and leading to scalability issues.
In fact, what you need to look for is an OEM that focuses on your customer satisfaction, from the start of the production process to your client’s final use of the product. Because, when your margins tighten, can you really afford any unpleasant surprises?
At ARPA’s we believe
your low-cost induction hob project’s success depends immensely on how we help you design, conceive and distribute it. That’s why we don’t charge research and engineering costs: we act like true business partners, by taking over the commercial risk for you.
Reach out to our team of experts to know how we can help your design and produce your low-cost induction hob… without making it cheap!
