Minding the Digital Store

Recently, a retail exec reminded me that not every retailer views their eCommerce channel as a store.   For many brick-and-mortar retailers, selling online started as an experiment that was shunted to the side of the mainstream business.  Granted, that may have been years ago for some.  But it's only recently that many retailers are seeing their digital store as a top performer.

Here's a great article from Deepak Gupta of LoginRadius that gives a strong argument for minding your digital store.

Why You Need to Treat Your Website Like a Real Store

If you sell anything on your website, you need to treat it like a real store. After all, it is a real store. It generates real money, and real people buy things from it.

It’s just online.

However, while many marketers may paint online stores and traditional brick and mortar stores with a different brush, they are a lot more similar than you might think when you take a closer look at them.

The challenges of ecommerce are still the same as traditional storefronts. You need to have a solid customer acquisition strategy, meet your conversion rate goals, and focus on website optimization strategies that will provide your customers with the memorable shopping experience.

Online Presence Is Just as Important as a Physical Presence

For starters, online shopping and ecommerce is a multi-billion dollar industry and is expected to grow by 20% this year to $1.5 trillion globally. If this is not enough to get your attention, I don’t know what will.

Consumer behaviour also dictates the necessity of having a strong online presence. One of the first things people will do when they want to buy something is check things out online, regardless if they are planning on actually making the purchase online or in a physical store.

“How much time do your customers actually spend online these days? The amount is staggering. According to Google, 97 per cent of consumers search for local businesses online. Your customers are online and you should be too,” says Alex Holden in The Importance of Having a Rich Online Presence. This is a staggering number that proves an online presence needs to be part of your customer acquisition strategy, even if you are only a local mom-and-pop shop.

Duct Tape Marketing provides some additional statistics that make the case for investing in your online presence to improve ecommerce conversions:

•  70% of consumers preferred to do retail shopping online.
• 89% of consumers use search engines to research a product, service or business before making a purchase decision.

For many companies, the reality is that their only presence is online. Even if you have a physical store, a strong and prominent online presence is a must if you want to drive traffic to your store. However, the truth is than most companies are missing out on sales and new business because they do not have a strong online presence.

According to Blur Group, 71% of business websites have an ineffective online presence, 80% are incompatible with popular search engines, 71% are not mobile ready, and a whopping 95% have no shopping cart functionality.

95%!! This is where website optimization becomes more important than ever.

Why You Need to Treat Your Website Like a Real Store

You need to treat your website like a real store because that is exactly what it is, and the similarities are very apparent.

“Run your business online as you run your business offline. The level of time, thought, care and development that goes into your brick and mortar business should also go into your website. This is what customers want you to do, and this is what search engines want you to do,” says Mark Walters from SEOmark.

“You wouldn’t give a store/office a strange name (domain), open it in a location that no one can find (rankings), fit it out cheaply (web design), get unprofessional, unknowledgeable employees to work there (content) and not market it (links and social media). Don’t make those mistakes with your website either,” he adds.

Walters’ observations draw an important comparison for people failing to see the connection between the two. Website optimization is very similar to optimizing the effectiveness of a retail store:

You can read the full article here:
http://blog.loginradius.com/2015/04/your-website-optimization/