Online selling has become a golden opportunity for every retail business. It was an opportunity that existed long before the great economic shift in 2020 but was only realized after thousands of businesses switched to delivery-only methods for those few crucial months. For many retail businesses, this opened an entirely new world of possibilities for retail: The ability to sell online, providing shipping, local deliveries, or prepare orders for pickup in addition to the sales made from customers who visit in person to browse the aisles and check out at the register.
Of course, to take advantage of these additional avenues of commerce, you first need an online store. To do this, you will need a website or to expand your current website with a product catalog, online cart, checkout process, and access to digital payment processing. Fortunately, you don’t have to build it all from scratch. Website services like Tailbase make it possible to easily streamline the creation of an online store.
If you are looking to add an online shopping experience to your retail customers here are a few of the top tips for transforming your retail business into a hybrid shopping experience.
1) Choose the Right Online Selling Platform
The first step is to build the foundation for your online store. You will need a platform that offers a sleek and navigable marketplace with categories and banners that align with your brand and the products you sell.
For smooth integration, choosing a platform like Tailbase allows you to swiftly add the necessary features and pages of an online store without restarting your website from scratch. Or, if you don’t have a store website yet, Tailbase offers the essential structure you need to get started. The right selling platform will become the baseline for your entire online selling strategy.
2) Create a User-Friendly Website Design
Naturally, you will want your online store to be friendly, welcoming, and easy for your customers to navigate. User-friendly website design is essential for guiding customers through the buyer experience and successfully converting curious browsing of your products into completed sales. Your catalog, category, and product pages should naturally lead customers from one page to the next, and your digital shopping cart should be easy to build, edit, and check during the shopping process.
The goal is to create a perfectly smooth shopping experience, so that your customers are never distracted in their journey from shopping to purchasing.
3) Build a Strong Brand Identity
Make your online store memorable and strongly aligned with your brand. One of the advantages of working with Tailbase is the opportunity to fully personalize the store’s design including the logo, color scheme, and banners. This ensures that customers associate their positive shopping experience with your brand and store through every click and page they explore.
A strong brand identity can be built with visual assets as well as your style of writing. Cultivating a specific voice and ambiance in your product descriptions and category pages can leave a stronger lasting impression with your customers, making your online store both more memorable and appealing.
4) Optimize for Online Search
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is also essential for the success of your online store. After all, if you can’t be found through Google, you might as well be invisible when locals are looking for somewhere to shop. You might not know this, but SEO can be used on more than just your homepage and blog articles: you can align each product and store page for online search visibility, as well.
First, make sure that each product page includes product-related keywords, as well as keywords that relate to the questions and solutions the product can provide. For example, a sofa can target keywords “reclining sofa”, “mid-century modern sofa ” “how to find the right sofa” and even mention a few shopping tips for a strong semantic keyword score in addition to a simple product description.
You can also build up your SEO with technical tricks like adding plenty of metadata to every page, image, and video that increases the searchability for each element of every product page.
5) Create High-Quality Product Listings
The quality of your product listings is also essential to your online store success. Many customers shop online because they want more information about a product before they buy. This is your opportunity to provide images from multiple angles, demo videos, and a well-organized description that tells customers more than they might discover when shopping in person.
Use every feature of your Tailbase product catalog to provide customers with the rich depth of information that they desire. A good catalog can not only help customers find the products they want on their first visit, but also encourage them to return for your excellent selection and informative listings so they can shop confidently in the future.
6) Implement Secure Payment Options
One of the great conveniences of online shopping is the ease of online payments. This, of course, means that your online store must offer a variety of secure payment options. The right online store platform will come with a built-in payment portal which provides customers the ability to pay immediately once they are done shopping, with no hiccups or interruptions that might distract them from the purchase.
The three most important elements of online payments are security, smooth execution, and payment options.
7) Prioritize Customer Service
Every retail experience should be accompanied by excellent customer service, whether in-store or online. There are two ideal ways to offer customer service to online shoppers. The first is with a live chat widget available in the lower right-hand corner on any page in your store. Connect this to a chatbot to greet and filter requests, then to live customer service agents to answer questions and guide customers to the solutions they need.
The second is a self-service information center where customers can search for their own solutions to common questions and easily solved problems. For example, your return policy should be easily found and searched for so that customers don’t even need to ask. This pleases today’s independent and self-directed audiences.
8) Develop a Marketing Strategy
Lastly, incorporate a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes both your in-store and online experience. Make sure customers know that they are welcome to shop in whatever way best suits them, from home delivery to curbside pickup to in-store shopping, depending on their mood and schedule. Marketing will alert current customers to new options and new customers to the delights of your store if they would not normally visit in person.
Unlock Your Online Retail Potential with Tailbase
If you operate a local retail store or regional brand, don’t let the opportunity of an online store pass you buy. You may multiply your yearly sales by providing an online shopping experience, the ease of online checkout, and the versatility of delivery options to your local customers. Tailbase makes this easy with a ready-built online store structure, an intuitive merchant dashboard to build your site, and dedicated support to help you customize your brand’s online store for the perfect shopper experience.
Contact us today to book a Tailbase demo and unlock your potential as an online brand.