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Omnichannel retail overview: What is it and why?
What is the omnichannel retail strategy and why should business owners care?
Well, these days the way people shop has changed enormously. No longer is shopping confined to brick and mortar retail stores relying on foot traffic. In the modern world, more and more people are using smartphones, tablets, laptops and even social media to search for items to buy and to make a purchase.
While people still buy products in-store, just as many shoppers are choosing to buy online. Even if they do decide to make an in-store purchase, chances are they’ve already done some research on the product via their phone or other device.
The omnichannel retail strategy is about not limiting yourself to one retail channel, but rather encompassing a cross-section of retail and digital platforms into your retail strategy mix. This way, you expose your business to a much larger customer base and have all your bases covered.
With an omnichannel retail strategy, a lot of important data is going to be produced but unless you have an effective way of collecting and understanding that data, you won’t be able to get the most out of it. This is where a suite of intelligence reporting tools come into their own.
You’ll be able to integrate data from all your different channels, bringing it all together in the one location. From your reporting software’s dashboard, you’ll be able to see, at a glance, which channels are the top performers and which channels are under-performing. Once you know this information, you could either find ways to improve under-performing channels, or cut them so you’re not wasting time on them.
Discover more about business intelligence reporting tools.
Now that you know what your top performing channels are thanks to your intelligence reporting tools, you’ll then want to focus on optimising those channels to improve their performance even further and to double down on them to increase traffic to your business and, ultimately, increase your business revenue.
Unless you can come up with obvious ways to improve the under-performing channels, there’s very little to be gained by continuing to focus on them. You’ll be better served putting your energy into the channels you know are working.
It’s vital that you integrate your technology across your digital channels and your physical store. All your systems need to integrate seamlessly to increase business rather than possibly losing potential business due to an illogical system or having no integration at all.
For example, modern customers these days expect to be able to purchase your products when browsing your website and not just when visiting your physical store. You want point of sale software that integrates with both your physical store and your eCommerce store to maximise sales and provide total shopping convenience for your customers.
eCommerce POS software also has payment gateways built into it so your customers have options of how to pay when they do add to cart and go through the checkout process. The more payment options your software provides, the more chance there is the customer will complete the purchase.
Shoppers may be browsing your physical store but are not yet ready to make a purchase. Having your products digitally integrated with QR codes attached means a customer can scan the code of a product they are interested in and make the purchase using their device at a later date.
Discover more about integrating your physical and digital channels.
