Ever since ecommerce has come into existence, there has been speculations that retail will soon be history. This fear is not baseless either. There was a huge dip in the figures when it came to brick and mortar stores. It was estimated that more than 6 million shoppers have given the retail stores a miss. The message that is loud and clear from such reports is that the online stores are here and they will keep wooing the consumers. But to say that retail will completely be overshadowed by ecommerce in the near future might be too far fetched. On the contrary, even retail can benefit from ecommerce.

Physical experience is important

According to a recent news, the ecommerce giant, Amazon is planning to open its first brick and mortar store in Manhattan in order to compete with brands like Barns and Noble. The company also mentioned that they will offer one hour delivery service within Manhattan. A certain segment of shoppers want the traditional retail store shopping experience so that they can touch and feel the products they are buying. While this is specifically true for GenX and baby boomers, the younger generation prefers to opt for online shopping whether it is their clothes or gizmos. Owning your purchase instantly is something that is appreciated by the buyers. For shoppers who appreciate the aspect of feeling and buying items instantly is only possible with physical stores.
However, with Amazon’s new service for its retail store can open up new avenues.

The need to reinvent

Customer satisfaction is the prime focus. All your customers require at the end of the day is good service. While ecommerce stores have impressed their existing and potential customers with their outstanding services, the brick and mortar stores should follow the same line in order to survive. The journey would be easier for them as they already have a success model in front of them. Look at the Apple stores. With time their physical stores have been successfully reinvented so that they can survice competition. Creating an in-store experience is necessary. Whether it is trying out a T-shirt or a computer, the need is to create unique experiences. In this regard, how can you ignore J.C. Penney? With its promotional strategies and a host of new in-store experiences, the 110 years store was successful in rebranding itself.

Adding legitimacy

It is always important to have a face, a representation. Physical stores are the faces for online businesses. When a company has a brick and mortar store, it adds legitimacy to the online brands. This is where the physical retail can hugely benefit from online businesses. The ecommerce solutions, has, in fact revolutionized the way business is being done. Yet the presence of a retail store provides legitimacy to the online business.

Improves Customer Relationship

The presence of both retail store and an ecommerce platform helps in enhancing the customer relationship as well as the management capabilities. While the online stores help them in searching the products easily, they can come down to the stores, test the product and then order the same. Customers who are already happy with your services and products can simply opt for the commerce platform and place the order. With the retail store, you can interact with your customers as well as potential customers. This helps in promoting customer loyalty and increases the chances of repeat purchase.

According to a survey people shopping in brick and mortar shops 40% of the shoppers spend extra while on online stores it the number is 20%. The in-store experience is hard to let go for most of the shoppers. For ecommerce stores, it is a great opportunity to attract the customers to their stores to ensure better success. If your strategies are in the right place, of course, your online stores can definitely from retail ones.

Here are some tips that can help you to boost your ecommerce conversion rates –

Make your website buttons stand out

Color pathways are effective ways to make the ‘buy now’ and ‘checkout’ buttons to stand out. These are supposed to guide shoppers and not blend in with the website background. Thus, it is important to ensure that these buttons are a little different from the rest of the lot. Using varying but meaningful colors can help you to achieve the same. Little changes like these have a huge impact on the buyers as these offer vital visual cues to the shoppers.

Concentrate on product reviews

If you are an online merchant, you will definitely focus on increasing your product range. But is that enough? Honestly, it is not. Product reviews must be your focus too. These contribute considerably when it comes to increasing the conversion rates. When customers see what the other buyers are thinking about the product it solves a number of queries for the potential customer as well. Therefore, the reviews as ecommerce solutions can work wonders in gaining the confidence of the new customers. Just make sure that the product reviews are genuine!

If you do not have product reviews, ask the customers who have purchased a new product to provide a feedback about it.

Include Trust Messaging

It is important to include the trust messaging in the right places. The trust badges work particularly well if they are placed on the cart pages that are near the action button for submitting order or checkout.

Guarantee your price

One of the major reasons why carts are abandoned is because the buyers might not be confident about the price they are paying. It is essential to ensure that the buyers are convinced that they are not overpaying in any way. If an e-commerce website wants it can deal with this problem at the very outset. One of the ways of dealing with this is by addressing the buyer’s worry regarding prices by offering a low price guarantee on the product page itself. A simple change like this can actually help the ecommerce website with better conversion rates.

Get rid of programming errors

Programming errors are annoying to say the least. They hamper the user experience and are one of the major reasons why shoppers cannot be converted to buyers. Nowadays, besides ensuring that the websites are compatible across various platforms it is also necessary to ensure that they work fine for the handheld devices as well. Amazon is one of those ecommerce websites that has dealt with such a problem with ease. Their error messages are not intimidating at all. As a result, they do not discourage the shoppers from progressing with their purchases.

Cart recovery is a good tool

There are various tools available in the market that can help the online merchants to know about the email addresses that are provided by the shoppers when they are in the process of checking out from the website. It is important at this stage to get hold of the data and email the potential customers if they have not completed the purchasing process.

Go mobile

Handheld devices are everywhere. If you are not going mobile you will end up losing customers. The ecommerce websites must be compatible with all kinds of handheld devices to ensure that the customers can reach from anywhere, anytime. User experience is a vital element that decides the conversion rates as well.

When an online merchant is increasing his conversion rate, he is also boosting the revenue and value of each of the visits that drops on the website. By increasing the value of the visits, the website can stand out from the competitors. In addition, there is PPC, SEO and email marketing that can further help in tapping the potential customers to help the conversion rates to grow.