We’ve seen why a website is so important for a small business to have, and the next big step to growing your business is adding an e-commerce store — an online shop. Adding a store to your online presence is crucial to increasing your revenue and sales velocities, both in the short-term and long-term. Let’s explore nine reasons you should be implementing an online shop for your brick-and-mortar business.
1. Enjoy a virtually unlimited sales ceiling.
You are limited in the amount of sales you can achieve at a brick-and-mortar location. Foot traffic, utility work (i.e., a three-week municipal project repaving the road in front of your business), limited budget, and few channels for advertising corner your sales by limiting your control. With an online shop, your business is not limited by your local market and marketing. People from the nation — or the world — can find and order your products.
2. Your shop is not only open to all people, but it is open at all times.
Some of the target market in even your local area may not have access to your store: Some people work nights and weekends, or have small children at home making them more immobile during the day. Some people just like the convenience of not having to leave their home and being able to conduct their errands and business online, with products delivered right to them. With an online shop, you fit everyone’s schedule, regardless of work, personal life, or time zone. Similarly, being open 24/7 gives you the ability to receive the benefits of sales while you live your personal life.
3. Improve the productivity and cost-effectiveness of your employee wages.
Another shortcoming of just a brick-and-mortar store is in your variable costs — your labor costs. Slow times of day can lead to idle time on your dime. Meanwhile, you could be using these inefficient labor-hours to process and ship e-commerce orders, potentially exponentiating your profit per wage-hour. (Keep in mind, you should compensate your workers for their responsibility and output — share the short-term growth to ensure good morale and tenure.)
4. Control your inventory.
You’ve likely experienced inventory lasting longer than you had hoped it would. Some products don’t move at all, wasting your valuable commercial space. With a broader market, you have a much larger volume of consumers to cycle your inventory. You’re also bound to interact with consumers with different preferences than your local market. You can even dictate sales velocity of specific products by promoting them with sales, featured items, and email campaigns.
5. Every year, drunk Americans spend $30 Billion online.
With that kind of expenditure, who knows what kind of wacky 2AM orders you can capitalize on. It’s best to get your piece of the pie.
6. Analyze your customers’ behaviors and interests with data and analytics.
One of the most glaringly evident benefits of having an online store is having the ability to analyze the shopping and purchase behaviors of your unique consumers. Data collected via visitor interactions with your online store will give you valuable information on your most prime-for-conversion prospects. Data ranges from:
Counting how many times a link or product are clicked upon;
Time spent on each page of your website;
What gets added to the shopping cart and in what combinations;
Time of day content and pages are being accessed;
Filters applied in your shop for tracking trends and popular categories.
Best of all, you don’t even need to do anything to collect this data other than implement an online store. There are many tools out there these days to automatically gather your data and transform them into statistics, analytics, and useful information for you. All you have to do is apply these conclusions to your future stock, content, advertising, and email campaigns.
7. More Options to Be Found with Sales Partners
Amazon is responsible for a majority of the 49% growth of e-commerce retail sales in 2017 — there is no question as to its popularity and familiarity among American households. Your business can harness that power by partnering with Amazon for your sales. It’s not a typical e-commerce store, but you can grow your brand familiarity with customers who shop on Amazon (it may be Amazon facilitating the sale, but it is your brand still receiving credit for the product and sale). Some of your repeating Amazon customers will even realize that it’s cheaper to go directly to your businesses’ website to purchase your products.
8. Stay competitive.
Maybe it’s true that you don’t need an online store to maintain your status quo and make ends meet. But the economy is ever-changing, aiming for growth and a lateral uplift. The economy is also fierce and brutal like nature — if you are not prepared and do not have the proper supplies and support to endure the shift, your business may very well not survive.
9. Maintain customer accounts, without the time and money spent on a loyalty program.
One of the key benefits of a loyalty program is maintaining a contact list (and all the subsidiary data and analysis subsects that become available, like analyzing by cohort). Contact lists allow you to reach into email marketing, to push sales and maintain brand familiarity and offer value to your prospects via inbound marketing. These prospects are much more valuable than the general population of prospects, as they are already customers of yours, so you know they are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. And as you know, it is more cost-effective to keep customers than to make new ones.
10. It’s easier than ever to open and maintain an online store.
There is a plethora of software available for setting up and maintaining your e-commerce shop. Shopify, WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix and other content management systems (CMS) offer free or business-plan memberships for not only websites, but also e-commerce stores. All the programming is done for you: You just need to use the intuitive platforms to upload your product images, write descriptions, and input prices. Even payment processing is done for you, all in exchange for a nominal percentage of your sales.
However, search-engine optimization, stock updates, product descriptions, email campaigns, and other general maintenance is not offered by these CMS platforms. That’s where Rapt Marketing comes in — so you can focus less on marketing and more on your business. Contact us today so we can learn more about your business and goals and propose a strategy that works for you.