It would seem that everything is obvious: one shop has a real point of sale, a hall with goods that can be touched and tried on, another is based in a virtual space. However, apart from the obvious things, there are some details that you might not even know about. In this new article we will talk about the differences and similarities between real and virtual stores, and discuss whether it is worthwhile to transfer a point of sale from offline to online and vice versa.
Synergy and differences in business processes
In principle, both models use absolutely identical business processes. This includes creating a business plan, launching or opening a store, purchasing goods, communicating with consumers, advertising and marketing, warehouse and accounting, and so on. The fact that the online store they make special programs, and in reality – living people.
Keeping a warehouse
In small shops, the goods are registered by cards or manually. They also close doors in the old fashioned way and hang up a sign that can last a whole day. In modern stores, of course, this is not the case, accounting and record-keeping is usually done with the help of programs or Mageworx extensions.
Merchandising
In the offline shop, boys and girls walk between the rows, who lay out the goods on the shelves on a certain principle. You all know it: what you need to sell as soon as possible, is laid out at the eye level of the buyer, cheap goods are at the bottom or at the top, where it is difficult to reach.
In e-commerce, the role of merchandisers is performed by services of commodity recommendations. They analyze user behavior and offer him products that may interest him. On such principle the mechanism of a clever tape “Facebook” or algorithm Reddit works – the user is shown those records or articles which a priori will be interesting to him. The service recognizes this information by analyzing the behavior of the person on the site, those products that he searched and browsed, order history, basket contents and even his accounts in social networks. Based on this information, the service gives personal recommendations to each client, which he can see and apply in practice.
Communications
In addition to personal communications with the customer, which for understandable reasons can not be in the online store, there are also mailing lists, telephone calls, SMS-notifications, and communication in messengers.
The online store is able to raise communications to an automated level. There are countless interaction options, and your task is to automate them and simplify them as much as possible. Ideally, communications should involve as few people as possible, your employees.
Categories of goods
What is offline, what in the online business category of goods set by you personally. There is one universal recipe: if you don’t know what to sell, take a look at competitors and especially big players. They have already gone through all this trial and error, already experimented and brought out the most optimal categories, filters. Take a look at how they draw up product cards, what kind of photos they take and do the same, and ideally – even better.
Important! On the site of the online store make sure that on the category pages users immediately show bonuses: promotions, discounts, promotional codes when buying. It can be a banner or a pop-up window: the main thing is that this information did not pass by the client.
Integration
The point where offline stores lose on all articles. The modern Magento 2 platform implies integration with various services for the convenience of the customer and your employees.