6 Tips For Brick And Mortar Stores Transitioning To E-Commerce

Transitioning To E-Commerce

Transitioning to e-commerce isn’t as simple as making a website and listing products. Going digital means translating key aspects of your brand online, including your marketing plan, brand awareness, accessibility, and customer experience.

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Brick and Mortar Stores Transitioning to E-Commerce

Here are a few key tips to ease your store’s transition to the e-commerce space.

1. Conduct Thorough Research

Transitioning your business into the e-commerce space requires a lot of research. Before adopting the online model, you need to understand the logistics involved. You’ll need to consider factors such as fulfillment and shipping, online marketing strategies, customer service, funding, and sale strategies before shifting operations.

Conducting proper research will help you identify how the change will affect each area of your business. Additionally, consumer behaviors are evolving much faster today; so, you need to keep up with them.

2. Optimize Your Website- Transitioning to E-Commerce

As a virtual retailer, your website gives the first impression of your brand. For this reason, it needs to be polished and designed for optimal customer experience.

In order to attract your existing customers to your e-commerce platform, you need user-friendly, intuitive interfaces. Make it easy for your customers to find what they want. This means showcasing your best products, having categories in your navigation bar, and using a prominently displayed search feature.

With e-commerce mobile sales revenue steadily increasing, brands that fail to deliver mobile-friendly experiences may suffer tremendous revenue losses. Therefore, your e-commerce website should be mobile-responsive to make it easier for customers to shop using their smartphones. In the long run, providing mobile access will bring in more customers and increase your reach.

3. Streamline Checkout and Payments

When switching from brick-and-mortar stores to an online system, you need to optimize your payment system. This will help you reduce the cart abandonment rate. According to research by Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.99%.

Consumers will abandon their shopping carts if there are pricing issues, the checkout process is too long, or they don’t trust your site with their credit information. To avoid such issues, ensure that your process is straightforward. You can also include other payment options such as mobile wallets and gift cards to boost your conversion rate.

In addition, you should include simple product return options. With this in place, customers can comfortably shop on your e-commerce website and return items easily if they need a refund or exchange.

Also Read: Top Inventory Management Plugins

4. Reorganize Your Customer Service Practices- Transitioning to E-Commerce

Once you shift your operations online, you’ll need to adjust your customer service strategy. To avoid losing your existing customer base, ensure that you can still meet their needs. With the new changes, you’ll experience more requests, questions, and issues around logistics and troubleshooting.

Ensure that you train your customer care representatives beforehand on how to address some of these customer issues. They can also identify new and arising problems and spot trends that need to be changed by the organization.

Since your business has a wide customer base, you can choose different mediums for your customers to reach you. You can use live chat, phone, email, text messages, social media, support tickets, or contact forms. To make the process seamless, give priority to customer feedback and provide an option to interact with them in real-time.

5. Focus On Your Shipping And Fulfillment Strategy

Shipping- Transitioning to E-Commerce
Transitioning to E-Commerce

Perfect your inventory management capabilities when transitioning to e-commerce. Your web store or app must integrate with inventory tracking to avoid stockouts and backorders. Mobile selling happens 24/7 and you can’t always have a human look at inventory levels at 2 a.m.

Thankfully, many eCommerce platforms make it easy to integrate inventory tools, automatically updating as you sell. Ensure that your e-commerce platform integrates with your shipping services if you are using a fulfillment provider.

This is a perfect place to leverage your in-store expertise, too. Inventory tools can tell you when you’re down to just a few of a product, helping you know to add pop-ups or sales notices to induce FOMO and get some sales. That automation can get tricky so many merchants use inventory management software to optimize tracking and eCommerce fulfillment operations as well as their in-store work.

Also Read: 10 Best WordPress Animation Plugins

6. Market Your New Platform- Transitioning to E-Commerce

Market- Transitioning to E-Commerce
Transitioning to E-Commerce

When transitioning to the e-commerce model, be sure to promote your new online store to customers and prospects who already know and are interested in your brand. Include digital marketing strategies such as social media and email marketing to grow and build the customer base.

According to data by Statista, 80% of marketers use email marketing while 83% use social media marketing as part of their digital campaigns.

Therefore, when you have a new product, you can collect customer emails and send regular store visitors personalized emails with exclusive discounts to drive traffic to your eCommerce store. Keep in mind that your target audience is the same, and don’t forget about customers that are loyal to your brick-and-mortar store.

7. Build an experience you would enjoy

Let your own preferences and experiences drive your mobile development. What have you liked or wished was better? Are there certain eCommerce platforms you think are easier to use? Is there a brand you love but whose mobile site or app is too cluttered to enjoy?

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Conclusion of Transitioning to E-Commerce

Questions like those can help you prioritize the user experience. Optimize for mobile devices to capture the most traffic and shoppers ready to buy. You’ve got solid retail insights, so now is the time to translate those physical elements into the digital space. By following the best practices, you can take your store online seamlessly and benefit from a much larger audience.

Jake Rheude

Jake Rheude is the Vice President of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an eCommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of eCommerce. He has years of experience in eCommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.


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