The use of technology in business has changed completely the way we buy in the 21st century, revolutionizing how companies can communicate their product offering to their final consumers.

However, despite the growth shown by online shopping each year, there’s still consumers that prefer to buy in store. In the United States, according to polls made by TimeTrade to a universe of 1,000+ consumers, 70% of the people prefer to buy in store when shopping for clothing, raw food and daily use products, choosing online shopping mainly for Electronics and home appliances.

70% of the people prefer to buy in store when shopping for clothing, raw food and daily use products, choosing online shopping mainly for Electronics and home appliances.”
Furthermore, one of the key intervening elements in the shopping cycle that radically skewed towards online is the “buyers decision”, where 82% of the polled claimed to visit online versions of almost every store to choose which product they want to buy, to compare features and then close the purchase in the physical retail store.

This results in evident benefits for all companies with online presence, regardless of the industry they’re in, being that every company can take advantage of ecommerce and online catalogs as a business channel but also as a marketing tool to show their products and services’ key features, in a way that can funnel sales into their brick-and-mortar shops.

(…)Every company can take advantage of ecommerce and online catalogs as a business channel but also as a marketing tool to show their products and services’ key features, in a way that can funnel sales into their brick-and-mortar shops”

These are four tips that will help you give your clients a way to buy the products they have chosen:

• Keep a dynamic control of your stock: ry to always have all products published in your online catalog available in all of your stores, using dynamic inventory systems with the possibility of integration between current stock and what you have online as “available”. That way, your clients can arrive to your stores and convert fast enough, not needing to ask for stock relocation, which generates delays that lower the conversion rate.
• Develop ways to reassign online shopping orders into retail stores: Using technology like NFC or QR codes, you can allow the client to arrive into a store and share the order -or shopping cart- they created online, in way fluent enough so that the sales clerks can just focus on enhancing the shopping experience and upselling, instead of reselling what the client has already decided to buy.
• Offer flexible payment types with online capabilities, like Apple Pay, Paypal or MasterCard Contactless. That way, you can help the user/client to close the purchase using only their cell phone. Fastness and flexibility for payments is one of the key benefits of online shopping.
• Work hard on your clients’ testing experience. Whether it is a nice fitting room or a very techy display for your smartphones, spend time and money so that your clients can test the products, see their features and confirm their quality. Remember: The online-referred client already knows what they want to buy, but they need to confirm that the quality of the product is according to their expectations, and it’s your duty to ease their way into confirmation and conversion.

Applying one or several of this tactics will quickly reflect in your conversion rate and it will allow you to generate real data related to the portion of your online-referred retail store sales, so that you can destinate budgets and boost capabilities associated to that.

Learn more downloading our brochure.