If you own and manage a physical retail store – but don’t have a website or online store yet, you could be losing out: Big time!
Whilst nothing can entirely replace the experience of browsing and shopping in a beautiful physical store, when it comes down to brass tacks, there are many limitations of running a brick and mortar business which could be holding you back from achieving your full potential.
Let’s take a look at three very good reasons why getting an online store (either to supplement or to replace your existing physical store) could be one of the smartest business decisions you’ll ever make…
Reason 1: Your brand will reach a wider audience
Think about it: A physical store is only as good as the location upon which it is situated: You’ll hear people bang on about ‘location, location, location’ a lot, but this is for a very good reason: Get it right and you’ll have a steady stream of customers flowing through your door, but fail to pick a decent place to set up shop and your stock will soon start to gather dust.
- Online, the whole world is your marketplace, but you can also choose to target incredibly specific niche markets directly, through advanced online marketing techniques, search engine optimisation and social media advertising.
- These days, when someone is looking for a product or service, you can count on the fact that more often than not, their first port of call is usually Google, not the local high street.
- Your store can be set up to run 24/7, 365 days a year – meaning that you can get business at hours when your physical store would normally be closed.
Reason 2: More customers = More sales
If you carry out a successful online marketing campaign, carefully optimise your ads and work on providing an outstanding online shopping experience for your customers, you could very well find yourself getting many more customers online than you ever could expect in your physical store – and as we all know, this increased digital footfall could very well translate into improved sales figures for you.
Reason 3: You can make big savings
If you’ve picked a great location to set up your shop and offer outstanding, popular products that sell all year round, your physical store might just start to pay for itself, but more often than not, you may be cutting things a bit fine at the end of each month, due to the expense of being situated in a prime location: A real Catch 22.
On the other hand, if you don’t have a favourable location for your business, or if your goods are seasonal in nature, you’ll already know just how painful – and expensive – it can be to run a physical shop when stock is not shifting…
Rent, utility bills, maintenance costs, local marketing, health and safety provisions, security and the myriad other running costs that come as part and parcel of running a physical store can soon add up and spiral out of control, whereas a successfully managed online store only requires you to pay for the hosting of the website, domain registration, support from your IT company and an active internet connection to access and manage it: Costs which will typically be a small fraction of what you’d pay for the upkeep of your physical shop.
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