If the past few years have taught retailers anything, it’s to embrace a digital-first approach. Whilst the likes of Boots and Amazon make it look like a piece of cake, there’s a lot of hard graft involved in transitioning a brick-and-mortar store to a booming ecommerce business.
In this post, we take a look at the benefits of moving your store online, how to handle an omni-channel sales funnel and offer a step-by-step guide to achieving ecommerce success.
Moving your store online: long term benefits
Whilst there’s been a lot of focus on the short term benefits of ecommerce due to in-person shopping being limited by the pandemic, there are also a variety of long term benefits to entering the digital landscape which really make it worth the investment.
More revenue
An online store never closes, meaning you can receive sales 24/7, 365. Brick and mortar stores are generally only open for around 8 hours per day, limiting how much money you can make. Without utility bills or a shop window to dress, you can quickly maximise profits with an ecommerce store.
Sell from anywhere
With a physical store, you’re limited to a particular area. An ecommerce store means you can serve the entire country, and even international territories. As long as you get your shipping costs right, lack of location restrictions gives you the freedom to serve a much larger number of customers, who can shop via their mobile devices anytime, anywhere.
Diversified customer base
It’s no secret that there’s a generational divide when it comes to shopping preferences. Millennial and Gen Z shoppers tend to prefer online shopping, whilst Baby Boomers lean more towards in-person retail. Adapting your brand experience for the online world allows you to target and appeal to those demographics that may not have discovered your store had you not cultivated a digital presence.
Moving your store online: step by step
1. Understand your audience
Before diving into the technical aspects of setting up an online store, take a moment to understand your target audience – specifically your digital audience. Is your brick-and-mortar store targeting the same audience as your online store? Launching an ecommerce store allows you to branch out and appeal to a broader audience. For example, you may use your digital presence to attract a younger demographic, or target an international audience.
Ask yourself:
- Who is shopping online for products like mine?
- How do they search for products and make purchasing decisions?
- What platforms do they use most frequently (social media, Google, marketplaces, etc.)?
By understanding your customer’s online behaviour, you can better tailor your offerings, marketing strategies, and user experience to meet their needs.
2. Develop a strategy
Now that you’ve got to know your audience, it’s time to make a plan. This gives you a chance to organise your timescale, budget and processes before diving in. You should also begin to consider your ecommerce and marketing strategy – which channels will you sell on? Will you offer a discount to encourage sales upon launch?
3. Create your online store
Taking into account your specific business needs and your target customer, you can make a decision on which ecommerce platform to build your online store. This decision is very important and should be thoroughly researched and well thought out, as the last think you need is a stressful and costly migration later down the line.
We recommend Shopify for beginners, as it’s easy to use and offers great scalability. You’ll find a step-by-step overview of setting up a Shopify store over on our how to use Shopify blog. This will entail creating key landing pages, product pages, shipping processes etc.
Make sure you have good quality photographs of every product and have conducted thorough keyword research to give your products the best chance of appearing in search results. It’s vital that your website is lightning fast and provides a seamless user experience. A slow loading speed leads to increased bounce rates and lower conversion rates. Shopify can handle thousands of transactions and visitors per minute, so you don’t have to worry about your website crashing when you need it most.
4. Start driving traffic to your store
Once your online store is set up and ready for launch, it’s time to implement a marketing strategy. If you’ve already got a social media following, publicising the launch of your website via your social channels can be an easy way to drive some traffic to your store immediately, and create a buzz in the run up going live. Same goes for an existing email marketing list. The great thing about already having an established brick-and-mortar store is that you may already have built up a following and loyal customer base who can help draw attention to your website. You can also use local inventory ads to drive nearby shoppers to your brick-and-mortar stores to make the most of foot traffic and ensure you aren’t neglecting your physical locations.
5. Manage your inventory
So you’ve set up your online store and have begun to fulfil orders. But just as you would restock the shelves of a physical store, you need to replenish your online stock, too. If you are running your online store alongside your brick-and-mortar shop, then you may face some unique challenges. This is because buying habits tend to differ between online and offline shoppers. Decide whether you will fulfill online orders from the same location as you will store stock for your retail shop – there are pros and cons to this. You will need to implement a highly organised system to ensure you don’t run out of stock for online orders when replenishing shelves and vice versa. This is another reason we recommended Shopify – you can use their POS system to keep track of in-store purchases and ecommerce sales in one place and organise your inventory.
Shopify’s advanced features can also minimise manual inventory management by streamlining processes order management, warehouse operations, and returns handling.
Brick and click stores: the future of retail?
Becoming a brick and click store allows you to take advantage of two different sales channels – all you need is a unified retail strategy. You may think that the future lies only in ecommerce, and after witnessing the impact of the pandemic on physical shops, you’d be forgiven.
But many ecommerce businesses, particularly fashion brands, have opened physical stores over recent years. The reaction to Topshop’s rumoured return to the high street demonstrates that there is still profit to be made in traditional retail.
Looking to develop your retail store’s online presence? We’d love to chat with you – send us a message and we’ll be in touch.
