September 29th, 2014 by Elma Jane
If your retail business products sells only in-store, then you’re falling behind. Consumers in the digital age expect options when they shop, and if you’re not offering those choices, your customers may pass you by for a more tech-savvy competitor. Consumers go into stores, evaluate products and buy online, or research online and go into the store for purchase. The two worlds have merged, if you’re not covering both spectrums, you’re missing out.
Recent research by UPS showing 40 percent of today’s shoppers use a combination of online and in-store interactions to complete their purchases. The days of physical stores being separated from online shopping are over. They’re no longer channels that are happening on their own. The UPS survey found that a large chunk of online shoppers cross channels during their shopping path. Be present on both channels and take advantage of that.
It’s not always possible or economic for an online-only retailer to open up a physical storefront, but existing brick-and-mortar stores or wholesalers can easily introduce an e-commerce component to their sales to expand their customer reach. Online sales help reach consumers that may not otherwise be able to purchase your products. Even if your company’s main focus is creating a personalized in-store experience, there are still ways to capture the online shopper market. In addition to giving consumers a way to research your products before coming in-store to purchase your offerings, you can offer people a way to conveniently buy items they already know they want.
For all the advantages a multi-channel sales strategy can give a retailer, there are still some challenges to this approach. Managing inventory versus cash flow and ensuring even demand on both channels have been company’s two greatest challenges in balancing in-store and online sales. Creating demand is how companies set themselves apart from competition. The secret sauce. The challenge is making sure that retail operations have a turnover ratio that works for the shipping schedules from the main warehouse. This isn’t a problem for e-commerce businesses, because product can be packaged and shipped as fast as it gets produced. But an omnichannel company has to take retail and e-commerce into account when stocking a warehouse.
There are a few different strategies retailers can use to help keep their sales operations well-balanced. Offering different items online versus in-store, to avoid inventory competition (i.e., selling seasonal or discontinued items online and current items in-store). Requiring a minimum order for online purchases or grouping products together rather than selling them individually to make e-commerce more worth your while.
The best way to balance a multi-channel sales strategy is to take a unified view of consumers online and offline by connecting their on- and offline behaviors via technology. Some of the retailers questions have is how to connect a person offline with what they buy online, how to recognize who they are in the store and know what they look at on your website, because people are switching back and forth. Link behaviors online with a unique ID through email or a mobile app, since 66% of customers use smartphones in-store.
Even if your business can’t actually sell and ship products via e-commerce,it’s still important to be in tune and up-to-date with the way customers want to interact with you on the Web. People are on the go, researching on phones and tablets. If you’re not savvy to what’s happening out there and don’t have the best-in-class SEO, you’ll miss out. You still need to engage in the digital world, even if it’s not always obvious.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, e-commerce & m-commerce Tagged with: brick and mortar, business products, consumers, customers, digital world, e-commerce, email, mobile app, multi-channel sales, online and in-store, online shoppers, online shopping, phones, products, retail business, SEO, shoppers, Smartphones, tablets, web
