Move your offline business online
Since the mid-2000s, eCommerce has been taking over more and more of the retail market. This has only been made worse by the pandemic. Every type of store, from grocery stores to car dealerships, can now at least do some of their business online because of new technology.
Over the last 18 months, United Tires have been able to change the way they do business. They used to be a pure brick-and-mortar store, but now they mostly sell their tires online. It was easy for us to move from one place to another. Here, we'll show you how we did that, as well as what we would have changed if we could.
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Test our ability to deliver online orders to customers who already buy from us.
If your new online store is going to be profitable, you need to make sure that you have the backend infrastructure in place so that you can get products to customers quickly and reliably.
You won't know for sure until you try it. The fact that you already have a customer base gives you an advantage over new eCommerce businesses in your field because you can find more people to sell to and test how well you can meet these orders.
In order to get these early orders in, you just have to tell your current customers that they can now get their products sent. Many people would always prefer to buy things online. So, if you have a good way to communicate with your customers (like an email list), some people will make this change without a lot of promotion.
People who already buy from you might need a little extra persuasion to make the switch. A discount for their first online purchase can help with this. It's more likely that they'll keep buying your products online if you can get them there on time and if they live near you, you should be able to get them there the next day.
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Make sure you market to places where you can offer free or next-day delivery.
Expanding to eCommerce is a good thing because you can now reach more people. You have to pick your fights with the people you want to promote to.
The chances are that you will use paid advertising to get people to visit your online store unless you have already built a big brand. You can buy traffic for a lot less money if you only advertise to people in certain places.
In order to make your overall offer more appealing, you should only advertise in places where you offer free and/or next-day delivery. If you say in your ad copy that you offer free or next-day delivery, you should see a rise in the number of people who buy from these ads. This will help you make more money per sale and grow faster in the long run.
3.Keep in mind that your inventory management will be under a lot more stress.
As a retailer, you'll be used to keeping track of your stock and inventory, but in eCommerce, you'll have to keep track of a lot more stock and deliver it quickly.
We didn't think about this, and we made the mistake of adding too many new products when we were first moving our business online. This made it hard for us to meet the delivery times we said we could and even got us bad reviews on the internet.
Make sure you don't add too many new products to your inventory in the beginning of your online transition and spend money on your fulfillment team. Omnichannel retail software can also help ease some of the back-end pains that come with growing your business, so it's worth getting good software.
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Do not get too complacent with paid advertising
Paid advertising is the fastest way to take advantage of your increased ability to sell, but in the long run, your need to keep spending money on ads will hurt your business.
The best way to market your new online store is to have both paid and organic growth strategies in place at the same time. Ads that aren't free can help you make money right away, find out which products are most popular, and figure
out what kind of communication works best for your target market. This should help you plan a long-term organic strategy that focuses on keywords with high buyer intent around your most popular products.
A rough guide for an organic strategy for a store that sells things online:
As you build out your product pages, you should make them as detailed as possible with photos and videos of the products that you sell.
Creating blog posts about things that your target audience should care about.
Engaging with public relations to get more people to link to your site.
Hire a technical person to make sure your site is built the right way (very important for growing websites).
Putting everything together:
The transition from a brick-and-mortar store to an eCommerce or hybrid one isn't easy, but your existing retail presence gives you a big advantage over a brand new eCommerce store that you start from scratch.
Fulfillment is by far the most difficult part of this pivot to get right at the start, so start small and work your way up until you are sure you can handle a lot of orders each day. Then work on building an eCommrece store and marketing your business more.
