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Whether you’re a DIY’er or a licensed contractor, finding the ideal faucet or an odd-sized valve can take too much time and cost too much money. PlumberSurplus.com seeks to ease that pain by offering fast access to the latest, most popular and hard-to-find products for plumbing, building and home improvement – at great prices.

Launched in 2004 with just a few thousand products, PlumberSurplus.com now carries tens of thousands of SKUs and has forged a strong relationship with the worlds’ leading home supply distributors. By stocking thousands of products in warehouses across the continental United States, as well as shipping direct from manufacturers, the people at PlumberSurplus.com know how to get products to customers fast. The company’s success is visible in the incredible growth it has seen over the last few years: PlumberSurplus.com exceeded $1 million in sales in 2005, and surpassed $10 million during 2007.

Plumbing the depths of online marketing

Google Product Search™ has been a key success factor for PlumberSurplus.com since its first day in business. Headquartered at what they call the “Surplex” in Riverside, California, the company thrives on the feeling that, at the end of each day, they are one step closer to mastering the art and science of online marketing. Google Product Search, when it was formerly Froogle, was the first comparisonshopping site the firm used. “In conjunction with our Google AdWords™ campaigns and organic listings, we wanted to gain visibility for our products, lower the cost of acquisition and create a name for the company,” says Online Marketing Team Leader Ryan Douglas, one of the firm’s first employees outside the founding partners. The company attributes nearly 10 percent of its monthly traffic to Google Product Search, with no associated advertising costs.

Google Checkout™ has also been a staple of PlumberSurplus.com’s marketing toolkit since it was first offered to online retailers. “We wanted to lower our transaction costs and gain more traffic,” notes Douglas. Not only have those goals been accomplished, but also the firm found that ads displaying the Google Checkout badge receive higher conversion rates than those without the badge.

A plumb line to profits

According to Douglas, Google Product Search has helped the company compete against industry giants and well-established multi-channel retailers. Douglas works in a group that manages search engine marketing campaigns on all major ad platforms, directs a growing affiliate program, and manages accounts for over a dozen different comparison-shopping engine websites.

Douglas considers Google Product Search to be by far the most successful online strategy PlumberSurplus.com has in its marketing arsenal – especially because Product Search is free. He adds that the conversion rate for Product Search traffic is 30 percent higher than the company’s average conversion rate. “The ROI from Product Search is huge. It is our most profitable property to place products,” he notes. “Using Product Search has helped drive more traffic to our site while lowering our aggregate cost per acquisition.”

Based on these results, the team has worked hard to improve the quality of the data they provide into Product Search by including as much information as they can about their products and by updating their information more frequently. They have automated the process of creating data feeds, enhancing team productivity and streamlining daily activities. They have also reallocated more costly traffic from other sites to Product Search. “We really tried to improve the quality of our data feeds,” says Douglas. “Following the holiday season, we saw a 62 percent increase in traffic from Product Search. We have to go with the winning strategy. And for us, it’s Google Product Search,” concludes Douglas.