How consumers shop these days has made e-commerce more relevant than ever for local business owners. And while many consumers still prefer to visit brick and mortar stores, e-commerce helps drive customers to local businesses.
Consumers these days like when their shopping experience bleeds over by starting their search in one place and then continue it seamlessly to another. This is partly due to consumers active roles on the internet and how much research they put into a product and service before buying.
Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to give your company an advantage in both your physical and digital stores.
Your website is an extension of your store
It’s very important for local businesses to realize that they are likely to have more visits to their website than their store and in relation to this, most customers who visit the store will visit their website first.
A 2016 Google and Purchased Digital Diary survey found that 58% of consumers visited a retailer’s website before making an in-store purchase.
Think of your website as a first impression more so than your actual storefront. Poorly designed sites, broken links, a confusing user experience could all be major turn-offs for your customers and creating a bad online experience. This bad experience can prevent customers from even reaching the online store, and worse yet your actual storefront.
This is often the case for a lot of smaller companies trying to get extra income from using e-commerce. But your site has to be as welcoming and easy to navigate as your actual store.
Don’t be scared to show your prices
Market Track recently found that 80% of shoppers compare prices online.
While that might seem scary to some business owners when thinking about their competition, there’s actually a higher chance of your company being completely taken out of consideration if you don’t have the price listed.
When customers are searching for products that are similar to what you sell, price does come into play when they make their final decision. Since e-commerce allows you to reach customers you didn’t know you could reach before, it also means customers have a wide range of companies to choose from. By not having your prices available the majority of the customers looking at your site won’t bat an eye to disqualify your business and continue with companies that are more upfront.
By not displaying your prices you also guarantee customers not heading over to your store to find them. If it came to the decision between you or a different company that wasn’t local, you’d have the upper hand. If you hide your price you are pretty much asking people to go to a different company.
Create a shopping experience
Much like not hiding prices, it’s also good to not keep any information away from customers as well. Customers love researching and knowing everything there is to know about a product and company.
Be creative and engaging on how you provide this info to customers. Create informative videos, post charts, ratings, and reviews. By providing a lot of information and breaking it up in different ways you are helping the decision making process, but also creating a clean and creative e-commerce experience.
It is essential that customers receive as much information as they can online. This is because no matter how appealing e-commerce is, there are two important factors that influence a customers decision which is interactions with a product and instant satisfaction.
When a customer is done researching, most will want to see the product in person. This is because most customers want to interact with a product before they purchase it.
People also love instant satisfaction. This is why if you’re a local business people will do their research online and then head over to your store instead of buying online. It saves them shipping time and price which feeds into instant satisfaction.
Thinking like an online retailer in today’s very hyper omnichannel market is essential for all business owners looking to give their company the upper hand it needs when facing competition. By treating your online store and brick and mortar store as one seamless experience they will both work together to help you gain a profit.