Integrating Your Physical Store to Your Online Shop
For every omnichannel retailer, aligning the in-store experience with the online experience should be a priority.
Clients expect to be able to move seamlessly from online to in-store and vice versa. They want to obtain a consistent brand experience throughout both channels.
Consumers are always searching for instant gratification, convenience, and the best possible experience regardless of whether they are on a mobile device, online, or in a store.
Consumers will not hesitate to find another business that can provide the experience they want if you don’t give them what they need when they need it.
If you want to stay competitive, you need to embrace both online stores and your physical shop by bridging the gap between them.
Here are several strategies you can use to integrate your offline and online presence.
Provide Live Chat
The ability to interact with a real person when they require help is one of the things online shoppers miss about the physical store experience.
A lot of clients hate the traditional methods of getting support online, whether it is to solve an issue with their order or ask questions.
Email can be impersonal and slow. On the other hand, phone support can also be extremely annoying if you’ve got to navigate an IVR to reach a real person who can help them.
Meanwhile, live chat makes the support experience easy and quick. Usually, clients do not have to wait for a long period to get help since most agents can manage a couple of chat sessions at a time.
Aside from that, clients also benefit from being able to continue shopping while they are talking with an agent.
Perhaps your consumers want to ask a question about your automatic capping machine. Live chat ultimately helps bridge the gap between in-person and virtual experience.
It does it by providing consumers with a convenient and fast way to get all of their inquiries answered by a real agent without picking up the phone or stepping inside the store.
Offer Inventory Availability
Nowadays, one of the keys to fulfilling the experience of a client is to have real-time access to product availability.
If you use a centralized retail order management system, you can guarantee that both your employees and consumers can view accurate status of your product inventory throughout the chain.
Showing this detail on your site is particularly helpful for consumers who engage in webrooming. These people expect your site to display which products are out-of-stock in your physical shop.
As a retailer, you don’t want to frustrate a potential client by showing that a product is available in-store, only for them to find out that it’s sold out when they arrive.
This is a certain way to lose a loyal client forever. Aside from that, the consumer might also share this experience on social media. This can negatively affect your reputation.
Be Social
Almost 75% of shoppers around the world say they utilize social media to research an upcoming purchase. However, unfamiliarity and uncertainty are major psychological hurdles for online shoppers.
If you have a physical store, it offers you a huge advantage over online businesses. You can easily feature your store, show your products, and highlight the personality of your employees on your social media channels and website.
Making sure that you have a consistent digital presence and showcase your physical store helps prospective clients to feel like they know your business even without visiting your shop.
This helps prevent uncertainty, establishes trust, improves the possibility of a sale, and creates a loyal client.
Perhaps you’re attending a trade show and you’ve hired a Las Vegas trade show booth builder. You can use social media to show this and you might be able to make several clients visit your booth.
Pickup Online Orders at Physical Shops
If you want to integrate a physical shop with your online store, store pickup is a basic requirement you need to have.
Most retailers have this incorporated with varying degrees of success. If you want to improve the experience of your client when it comes to store pickup services, here are some tips to follow:
- Remember to Cross-Sell
Store pickup is your chance to up-sell or cross-sell. The reason for this is that the online client is now inside your physical shop.
You can provide other products that go with the order of the customer. Typically, you will also give them a discount.
A lot of businesses miss this revenue chance in the rush of fulfilling the order. Make sure you always up-sell or cross-sell when a customer is picking up an order.
- Be Ready Ahead of Time
As soon as the order is ready for pickup, make sure you notify the client. Since your physical shop doesn’t have unlimited space to keep all the orders, you can provide clients 3-5 days of window to pick up orders.
- Have a Separate Department
You need to have another department in your physical shop that handles online pickups. This makes it easy for clients to get their orders.
Also, this department should avoid competing for employee time with the other clients. Furthermore, you need to ensure that the existing customer service of your physical store can handle online pickups without affecting the experience of your physical-store clients.
You should not please online clients at the expense of ignoring your physical-store consumers.
Don’t forget to bring hand sanitizers as well when handling products for your consumers.
Conclusion
Nowadays, you don’t have to choose between providing a great in-store experience and an exceptional online experience. You need to offer both.
Successful businesses are the ones who are finding innovative methods to combine all channels into a single cohesive experience that can help meet the expectations of consumers. If you follow the tips above, you can easily achieve this.
