By being a local retail store, you have the advantage of targeting hyper-locals with whom you can get in touch in person & maintain a healthy relationship to achieve your targeted sales goal!
But what if you get to know that by following this bygone approach, your viability of expanding your business & churning more profits out of it is dropping down as you target a limited audience.
The physical presence of a retail store is a must to cater to local customers and strengthen your roots in the market, but if you turn a blind eye to the on-going trends of eCommerce & m-Commerce, you are forfeiting your chances in the long run.
With the increasing number of tech savvy users, business owners need to upgrade their working/selling methodologies to drive more sales.
To move with the ongoing technology-driven market trends & to maximize your sales, you need to convert your retail store to an e-tail store.
How can you do that? Here the answer!
- Create a mobile-friendly responsive eCommerce website
Get an online website for your physical store is the 1st thing that you need to do. The retailer’s need to make sure that their website is up, running & accessible to the buyer, and is updated with almost all the products from their catalog.
The store owner needs to ensure that his website is responsive in design and can be browsed thru desktop or mobile phones with its proper functioning.
Today, more than 57% of the customers prefer browsing thru their mobile phones & there is a high possibility of their bouncing back if the website is not viewed properly on their handheld devices.
If you have a mobile site up and running, make sure that it fulfills the following requirement:
- Responsive design: Adaptive to any mobile or tablet devices.
- Product display & its description: Display the complete product catalog with proper & visible description
- Loading & browsing speed of the website: The website should load faster.
- Search tools with automatic suggestions functionality: Search bar to search for products using their name or attributes.
- Scroll down for new products: Let the user scroll down to find new products rather than click for new pages.
- Single page checkout option with options to pay-online/wallet: User should purchase by making his payments online.
- Go Cashless by using online/mobile payments solution.
Retailers can drive their customers to their online web-store to browse through the complete product catalog without speaking to any sales executives. They can choose the products on their own and can complete the shopping using the self-checkout option.
Retailers can also install self-checkout kiosks in their physical store using which the user can browse through their online store and make a purchase of their preferred products by making online payments to the store.
POS devices can also be used to enable the digitalization of the physical store.
The retail stores have many benefits of going cashless & by using their web-store to drive sales. Using this approach, they can cut down the hustle of hiring sales executives who assist the buyer in his shopping; the buyer can search and find the product as per his requirement and make a selection on his own terms.
The retailer’s physical store dependency will not be an issue now as he has more ways to drive sales.
- Promote your business digitally.
To get an online business up & running, you need to get the business promoted in the online space where buyers searching for any product/service related to your catalog can see your listing with the link of your website. This marketing will increase your brand visibility, which eventually increases in customer visits & order creation.
One of the easiest & most effective ways to market your products is by investing in paid searches. These paid promotions ensure that your listing is showcased at the top of search engine results with immediate effects.
You need to invest in paid searches and boom! Any user who searches for the product related to your catalog can see your name on the top of search engine/Google results.
The paid promotions empower you to get quick results in searches while the SEO practice takes time in doing the same.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an organic way to optimize & improve your website’s visibility and ranking on the search engine’s search results. As compared to paid searches, SEO takes some time to show the results.
- Showcase your online product catalog
The user coming on the website wishes to purchase some of the other products listed on the website. The products are listed on a virtual platform where the user can neither touch & feel the product nor use the trial room to check how it fits.
In this virtual ecosystem, brand/product catalog plays a vital role in enhancing the customer’s buying experience and increasing sales. The store owner needs to showcase the products on his website with the best of its images and the complete description & how to use instructions.
Online selling is all about how the products are displayed/showcased on the website.
The digital cataloging process can drive more sales by showcasing more relevant products about the product being viewed by the buyer.
The technique of doing this is known as UPSELLING of products. Fusing the searched products with some more related products will lead to more user engagement, which would increase the number of orders, which would eventually increase the revenue churned.
- Run in-store promotions for buyers (Discount coupons & cashback)
Running in-store promotional activities like instant discount coupons, promotional cashback offers on the order amount, earning on referrals, etc. are a great way to engage users to buy more products from the website and even to promote the website by referring it to their family & friends to qualify for the promotional cashback.
The website can also provide the buyer with some goodies/Freebies for his brand promotions & enhanced customer shopping experience.
Customers love to receive discounts, cashback, and freebies/goodies, which encourages them to make purchases through online mediums rather than offline physical stores.