10 things every retailer should know about selling online(2)

Today, we share with you the second part of this post about things that every retailer should know about selling online (here's the first part). 

If you have a physical store and you are considering the possibility to start selling online seriously, first there are some things you need to know not to be surprised. 

The thing is that selling online may not be exactly as you had imagined. For this reason, it will be good to contact some facts related to e-commerce before making up your mind. 

We hope that, revealing these issues, you can make the right decision for you and your business in terms of distribution channels. Let´s start! 

One of the great advantages of selling on the Internet is that it allows you to reach a much higher volume of audience than you would get just with a physical store. And what is more, it allows you to reach audience geographically located very far from your physical location. 

It is the audience, who, adopting a strategy of pure retail, you could only reach by opening a store in each of the cities where they are, with the consequent economic investment (massive) in points of sale, staff and stock. 

On the other hand, on the Internet you can reach all Spain, Europe or the whole world without the need to open a store in every city or country. That is one of the great advantages of selling online: based on a local physical situation (your store and/or your warehouse located in one  place), you reach a geographically decentralised audience. 

This is the dark side of the huge range you have when selling online. And it is that,  just as your offer can reach everyone, all the competition in your industry on the Internet is likely to have an impact on your sales. 

In other words: With the Internet, customers increase greatly but also the competition. Online stores that so far had not been a problem for you, become direct competitors that can prevent you from growing or, in the worst case, steal the market share you already had. 

For this reason, before starting to sell online it is important that you make a good benchmarking of all the online stores with potential to become your competitors. 

Analyze your brand, your catalogue, your marketing strategy –price, product promotion and placement – and, if you can, seek experts to analyze your SEO and implement a SEO strategy that will give you results in the medium-long term. 

One of the things that, someone who is going to start selling online does not usually keep in mimd, is how to carry out the control and movement of inventory, as well as orders tracking, when combining physical and online store. 

If that is not taken into account, both channels are out of sync; And it may happen that you sell a product online that you no longer have stock because you sold it at the physical store, as you do not  have orders and inventory synchronized, a management system does not detect what has happened in the other. 

In this sense, it is very interesting to try to have a unified management system, that records all the orders coming from the any channel, offering the same updated information of the stock status in both physical and online stores. 

Ecommerce is increasingly led towards multichannel and omnicanal. That is, the customer no longer seeks or expects a different experience on each channel through which a brand operates through, but aspires to have a unified brand experience on all of them. 

It is important that the different channels cooperate with each other and that synergies are established among them, that is: that the global experience, that the client of your brand has, improves thanks to the fact of offering your product through two (or more) different channels. 

In this sense, if you start to have an online store in addition to your physical shop, it is important that you try to create synergies between them. In this way, you will create a unified perception of your brand n your clients and also an experience that will far exceed the experience they may have if you sold only through one of these two channels.