Most retailers don’t launch with a brick-and-mortar location and online store simultaneously. Instead, they tend to specialize in one domain before branching into the other. Because of this, what often emerges are two silos — each with inventory and payment options. Not only does this make it more difficult to share information between your physical and online stores, but this lack of integration also results in a worse overall user experience for your customers.
Much has been written about how e-commerce is affecting retail stores. It’s true that online shopping seems to gain in popularity with every passing year. However, many customers still prefer the tactile experience of in-person retail. With a truly integrated shopping experience, your business could target both types of customers no matter how they wish to buy.
What Is an Integrated Retail Experience?
An integrated shopping experience is one in which customers can interact with your business across many channels — including online, via mobile app and in-person — in order to buy the products and services they need.
For a truly integrated physical and digital experience in retail, however, data collected through one channel needs to be shared storewide. This should ensure that important customer metrics such as buying patterns, shopping habits, payment preferences and other “personal” details follow each customer — no matter when, where or how they interact with your brand.
Brick-and-Mortar Shopping vs. Online Shopping
Having a physical and online store can help expand your reach, allowing you to sell more products and services across the board. To understand why this is, however, it helps to appreciate the key differences between brick-and-mortar versus online shopping — and what aspects of each might appeal most to your customers:
- Brick-and-mortar shopping is the older and more established of the two. It involves customers visiting your store in-person to browse your inventory, fill their baskets and pay for their items at the checkout counter. This experience is more tactile, allowing customers to touch and visually inspect each item before selecting it. However, the inventory is limited simply due to spatial constraints. Moreover, every in-person customer must live or work close enough to physically visit your store. One huge upside of in-store shopping is that customers can ask staff any questions they have directly.
- Online shopping is the newer of the two methods. It involves customers browsing your inventory from a computer or smart device before putting selected items into their online shopping carts and paying for their baskets at the checkout page. Because the entire process happens remotely, customers never have an opportunity to touch or sample products before buying them. However, with warehousing and depots, the inventory can be much larger. Plus, thanks to shipping and delivery, your customers can live anywhere. Asking questions, however, may involve chatting with a bot, sending an email or patching into a call center.
Because there are pros and cons of both shopping options, integrating them allows you to satisfy more customers.
Ways to Create an Integrated Shopping Experience
Improving the customer experience in the retail industry isn’t a one-off fix. Normally, it’s something that unfolds in stages as you slowly unify the online and physical aspects of your store. Below are some of the more common strategies retailers use to achieve this integration.
1. Upgrade Your Technology
The first step involves making sure you have a unified payment platform to process sales — regardless of their origin. Working with a single payment processor facilitates this since you can benefit from an online payment gateway for e-commerce sales and physical credit card terminals for in-person transactions.
What’s important is that the payment platforms be able to share and communicate data to one another and to the software and accounting tools you already use to run your business.
2. Omnichannel Marketing
This is similar to the above. However, instead of unifying payments under one roof, you consolidate your marketing efforts — with online and in-person advertising materials complementing one another. In layman’s terms, this means that discounts you share with in-store customers should also be shared with your e-commerce users (and vice versa).
Be sure to read our resource-rich article on omnichannel marketing for other examples of how this works.
3. Social Media
Although in-person shoppers might occupy the physical world, they often carry their smart devices with them. This means that the social media campaigns you use to boost your online presence can also be used to “geo-target” the shoppers who visit your store in-person.
4. Promotions
We’ve already touched on this briefly — but all promotions, discounts, reward points and exclusive offers should be shareable in-person and electronically if you want to truly unify the shopping experience for your customers. Launching a dedicated loyalty program — complete with physical and electronic membership cards — can help make the integration process more streamlined.
For additional tips on attracting repeat users, be sure to read our resource on customer retention strategies.
5. Lead Customers to Products
Whether online or brick-and-mortar, most retailers want their customers to buy as many products as possible. In-store displays work well for many physical stores. With e-commerce, however, it’s a bit harder’s simply due to the limited real estate of most smart screens. Even still, it’s possible to guide customers toward desired purchases.
For example, you can:
- Gamify the shopping experience to keep users on your site longer
- Present upsells and add-ons just prior to the checkout page
- Offer free shipping for online orders over a certain amount
- Give your most profitable items higher priority in the catalog
- Create dedicated sections on your site for the latest deals
It’s All Coming Together
Although it’s possible to manage two sales-generating silos, integrating your online and physical stores offers a host of powerful benefits. It can create a more seamless user experience for your customers (many of whom oscillate between in-person and online shopping). It also provides a wealth of actionable information since you can see all these incoming sales, marketing campaigns and social media outreach opportunities from a single unified dashboard. This, in turn, allows you to make better informed decisions as you continue to grow your business.
To discover how we can help you more fully integrate the different spheres of your retail store, schedule a free consultation with CardConnect’s payment integration experts today!