RIMtailing: Integrate Multiple Shopping Channels

Friday, May 28, 2010

Integrate Multiple Shopping Channels

Give your customers multiple channels to use to buy your product and service offerings: Brochures with order forms. Catalogs. Telephone orders. A booth at community events. All those might work for you. One key to successful use of multiple channels, though, is that they are integrated. For example, information about pending orders is available via all the channels.
     The most popular channel to augment store-based retailing is a website. A well-integrated website makes money for you. Retailing consultants report that Saks Fifth Avenue customers who shopped at both Saks.com and at a Saks store spent five times as much as did customers who used just one or the other.
     Retailers who maintain the online channel do worry about what they call “shopping cart abandoners.” These are people who put items into the online shopping cart and then leave the website before completing the purchase. But for the multichannel retailer, shopping cart abandonment can sometimes be great news: Studies have found that about one-fourth of the customers of hybrid store/website retailers like to do their browsing online, but prefer to make their purchases in the store.
     So it is not online shopping cart abandonment as much as it is having purchase-ready customers arriving at your store where you can show them other items they can use. When an REI.com customer comes into the REI store to pick up the items they ordered online, as more than one-third of them choose to do, those customers, on average, buy an additional $75 in merchandise.
     Do you encourage your online shoppers to surf on into your store? Are there easy-to-follow driving directions on the website along with store hours and phone numbers? When I go to your website, will I see photos of your friendly salespeople just waiting to enthusiastically welcome the arriving me?

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Bruce D. Sanders, PhD

I’m a consumer behavior researcher who helps organizations and individuals improve the results of their influence initiatives. The key is putting to use what we’ve discovered about the ways in which our customers, clients, donors, patients, voters, employees and prospects find value in what we offer. I've worked with hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals to maximize their successes and the joy in persuasion. For more information about me, please click here. To contact me, please email rimtailing@gmail.com. Welcome, and thank you for your interest in the RIMtailing blog.

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