There are millions of people searching the internet every day, looking for products and services. Online retail continues to grow, year on year, as customers seek out the convenience that eCommerce offers. Convenience like being able to search and make purchases whenever and wherever they want. It’s no surprise that modern consumers are doing more and more of their shopping online. By selling online, you can tap into this market of online shoppers and expand your consumer-base. But there are actually some other benefits of selling online that you might not have expected.

Increase brand awareness

The majority of modern shoppers search for products online, before making up their minds on what (and where) to buy. Having an online presence means potential customers can find your shop and see your products when they search online. Consumers who find your shop in their search results will be more likely to buy from your store. While shoppers who don’t find you online might find your competitors instead.

Sell day and night

One of the great upsides to online retail is that, once your online shop opens, it never has to close. You don’t need to have staff around to handle transactions online, so you aren’t limited by your usual working hours. This means that shoppers can buy from you whenever they want. You can essentially make your shop 24/7, without having to hire on more staff for the graveyard shift. By offering customers the option to shop, whenever they want, you can tap into the growing market of shoppers who prefer to browse products and make purchases, from the comfort of their own beds, outside of usual working hours.

Make cost-efficient sales

The cost of a website is all in the initial expense of setting one up. Once your eCommerce-enabled is live, it can take very little to maintain. This means that, in the long run, your website can be your most cost-effective sales outlet. Without needing to be staffed, and without the usual costs of renting physical space, your site can keep operating costs low, while still offering a slick, convenient customer experience that makes you sales.

If you’d like to know more about selling online, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The post 3 Surprising Benefits of Selling Online first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post 3 Surprising Benefits of Selling Online appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

Everyone is online these days. As a retailer in modern times, you’ve got to engage customers online and bring them into your bricks-and-mortar store. Fortunately, connecting your online and real-world presence isn’t as difficult as it once was. With retail technologies like ePOS, you can bring the online and in-store sides of your business together.

Petit Miracles uses Vend ePOS to help them keep track of and connect their online and in-store sales and customers. This helps them understand their business and their community. Without wasting time on more old-fashioned tracking and analysis, the folks at Petit Miracles have more time for other important areas of retail. Like selling, fulfilling customer’s needs and keeping their products interesting and creative. They’re an award-winning independent for a reason, you know.

But if you’re wondering what exactly an ePOS can do for you, well there are a few things to bear in mind. First and foremost, ePOS means tracking. It connects to your sales and stock data to keep track of what’s selling and when. This gives you valuable data that you can use to make data-driven decisions to benefit your shop and improve your sales. You don’t need to make assumptions or take stabs in the dark when important decisions need to be made. With an ePOS you can receive sales reports that back up your decisions with real, helpful stats. The other big advantage of ePOS is that it integrates with everything else your shop does. They can connect with ecommerce systems, staffing rota software and even customer loyalty programmes. EPOS is a great modern retail technology that many independents aren’t taking full advantage of.

Take a 30 day free trial of Vend ePOS – the ePOS provider used by Petit Miracles themselves!

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The post Retailer Talks: Connecting Online and In-Store first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post Retailer Talks: Connecting Online and In-Store appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

The internet is a hugely important part of modern life. Everyone uses it and everyone is using it more and more as time goes by. The importance of the internet is rising with time. This makes it a hugely important tool for small businesses, especially retailers. Not just ecommerce retailers either; anyone can grow their business online. It’s a great way to reach out to the modern consumer, on your website or social media platforms, and keep them engaged with your brand.

The internet is filled with millions of people who search for things related to you and your products. They’re searching to find someone who’ll connect them with the products they want to buy. Even if you don’t sell those products online, by putting your shop out there you’re letting consumers know you’re there. You’re making yourself discoverable. And discovery is the first step to seeing your footfall rise.

Create Business Profiles on Social Media and Google

This is a pretty simple step toward taking command of your online presence, but it makes a huge difference. Shoppers are searching for you. They’re searching on google for your products, they’re checking google maps for shops like yours, they’re looking for your shop on social media. Shoppers are searching for you, but unless you put your shop on the map, how will they find you?

Having a website is a great way to make yourself discoverable. But even outside of that, if you have social media profiles for your business you can be discovered on google, as well as on the platform you made the profile for. Setting up a google ‘my business’ account can also get you found on google maps, which is a huge step toward getting discovered by customers who haven’t heard of you before, who are looking for the nearest shop that sells the products they’re looking to buy.

Be Active

Just having an online presence is a big step in the right direction. Though if you really want to make the most of it, you need to stay active online. You need to show customers that you’re active on social media to encourage them to engage with you. No one wants to take the time to post to a derelict page that hasn’t been active since it was created. By taking the time to post about your shop on your social profiles, you can increase your reach and engage your existing fans.

And if you don’t do it…

Well, funnily enough, if you don’t do it someone else will actually do it for you. But, believe me, you don’t want that. Why? Because if you don’t take command of your online presence, other people will be able to take control. They’ll control how your shop is perceived online. If you don’t have a facebook profile, and someone posts about how upset they were with your products, not only are you unable to reply, but that unhappy post will also be the only thing anyone can find about you on facebook. People are going to talk about you online and if you want to be part of the conversation, you have to take command of your online presence.

It’s the same for google too. If you don’t create a ‘my business’ profile, someone else might add your shop to google maps. And they might get things wrong. Important things, like your address or shop name. Things that customers need to know if they’re going to visit your shop.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about how to take command of your online presence.

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The post Take command of your online presence appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

Your website is like your store front online. For many of your customers it’ll be their first point of contact. These days more people than ever are researching shops before they choose where to take their commerce. Shoppers are googling shops in their area and if you aren’t in the results, you might as well not exist. Even if you’ve no intention of selling online you need a website. Because shops’ websites aren’t just about selling. Below are a few of the reasons why websites are an important part of every business, even ones without ecommerce.

Be Discoverable

Having a website can (in the case of google maps, quite literally) put your shop on the map. If you can’t be found online you’ll miss out on countless customers. Customers who are searching for your products online and finding your competitors, but not you. In this digital age, everyone’s looking online. Even if you sell products that wouldn’t fit the online world well, such as perishable foods or bespoke clothing, customers will search for your website before visiting you in person. They’ll want to see pictures of your products and read about your shop’s story, before they decide to pay you a visit in the real world. You need to make sure these customers can find you, or they might not visit you at all.

(Almost) Free Exposure

Creating a website doesn’t cost very much nowadays. Especially if you’re willing to learn some basic website development. With tools such as WordPress and Wix, you can build a professional looking website yourself, a choice many new businesses are choosing to make. It’s easier than ever to make a website and once its online, it’s there for everyone to see. Anyone searching for the products you sell, or looking for shops like yours, in their area, will be able to find your site. And when they find your site they’ll find whatever you’ve chosen to display there. You can have pictures of your products, testimonials from happy customers, a video tour of your shop, the list goes on. You can really advertise whatever you want, to frame your shop in the customer’s mind, so they’re ready to buy when they visit.

Increase footfall and sales

Every shopkeeper knows that more visitors means more potential sales. Well once you’re discoverable on google, you can increase your reach to countless potential customers. Most of whom might not have found your store in person. You can make sure that they find the best of your company online. Rather than googling your shop and finding nothing at all, or worse, finding a couple disgruntled reviews on yelp, you can make sure these customers are seeing your shop the way you want to be seen. This is a great way to grow sales and expand your base of loyal customers.

If you’re considering setting up a website, don’t forget to check out our special offer from the UK Domain, powered by Nominet, who are trying to help local independents get set up on the web.

If you have any thoughts or questions on the benefits of having a website, please get in touch with our team.

The post The Benefits of Having a Website, Even if You Don’t Sell Online first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post The Benefits of Having a Website, Even if You Don’t Sell Online appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

Online accounting is a great way to smooth the process of accounting. It takes away the friction of frequent visits to the bank or to your accountants. It lets you keep track of your cash flow, costs and profits at the drop of a hat. And it doesn’t require great blocks of paper, filling cabinet upon cabinet with fiddly paper work. Modern, online accounting is efficient, it’s convenient and it’s going to help independents stay on top of their finances.

Online Accounting is Accounting on Demand

Online accounting gives you a 24/7 connection to the financial information you need to keep your shop running. This means you can have the financial knowledge you need, when you need to make those big decisions. No more waiting for the bank or your accountant to get back to you. No more putting off important decisions until you can get your hands on the information you need about your own shop. With online accounting all this information can be quite literally at your fingertips.

This is a great way for online accounting to empower independent shopkeepers and level the playing field with big chains. Big companies can afford to have a large in-house accounting team. The reason they maintain large teams of accountants is so that they can have the knowledge they need, when they need it. This is expensive and most independents don’t have the resources for it. Online accounting is a great way to even the odds and get on-demand financial support.

And it Doesn’t Require a Small Forest of Paper

This is something that can only be appreciated after years of offline accounting. The stack of paper that can build up with accounting work is a staggering thing. Especially when you don’t have an in-house accounting team like the big chains do. It’s a lot of paper for a small team to look after and without time-consuming frequent audits you can build up a backlog of unnecessary paper work. Paper work that you can’t be sure you need, but aren’t certain you can get rid of either.

Online accounting, on the other hand, is paper free. You don’t need filing cabinet upon filing cabinet of old papers and statements, you can view it all online. It’s stored away electronically, in easy to access, easy to catalogue online storage. You’ll never lose an important piece of paper again and it’ll all be filed away for you automatically.

If you’d like to learn more about online accounting, feel free to get in touch with us here.

The post How Online Accounting Can Make Your Shop More Efficient first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post How Online Accounting Can Make Your Shop More Efficient appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

Click and collect lets customers order online and collect in store. It’s a great way to bridge the online-offline divide. It gives your customers the convenience of browsing your wares online, from the comfort of their own homes, while also bringing those customers into your shop. Your customers will experience your physical, bricks-and-mortar shop and they’ll walk past all your lovely products as they go to collect their purchase. This system is a win-win for both customers and retailers. It gives customers the convenience of shopping online, without sacrificing the in-store shopping experience.

This is great for your existing customers, but it can also be good for bringing in new customers. There are shoppers who aren’t sure they want to visit a shop’s physical store. Maybe it’s a long trip and the consumer doesn’t want to travel if they aren’t guaranteed to buy anything. Maybe they work weekdays and weekends and there’s no convenient time for a nice long shop. With ecommerce and click and collect, customers can know for certain that the journey is worth it. And if they can only pop in for a moment? No problem, they’ve already decided what they want, they won’t need to have a long look around. Once they’re in-store of course, they might find something else they hadn’t considered. Something they didn’t look at online, but has caught their eye now that they’re in to collect.

Alternative to Shipping Charges

The great retail paradox is that customers want the highest quality products, but at the cheapest possible price. Shipping costs can cause customers to hesitate. Especially on smaller purchases, where shipping can double the cost of the product, and larger orders, where shipping can escalate in price very quickly. Offering click and collect eliminates this awkward cost of delivery.

Click and collect can also be faster than delivery. It might seem strange, but it’s true! The standard time-frame for a small delivery is 3-5 days, with next-day delivery coming at an uncomfortable premium. With click and collect, your customers can drop by to pick up their purchase as soon as you accept the order. This means same-day delivery (of sorts) for customers that are likely to be passing by anyway.

If you’d like to learn more about click and collect, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team here.

Read our article about the benefits of e-commerce and see how you can get online retail to bring more customers into your shop.

The post What Click and Collect Can Do for Your Customers first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post What Click and Collect Can Do for Your Customers appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

There’s no doubt that the world is addicted to the internet. Many people are connected to the net all day, every day. This is something that some business owners are leveraging to their advantage. Many business owners focus on customer satisfaction as one of the major keys to success, yet so often these same business owners turn their nose up at public wifi. It offers a convenient line to friends, family and the internet at large. Customers don’t want to be disconnected when they walk into your shop and the recent market research suggests that customers spend more time, and money, in shops that let them stay connected. It’s not surprising that free wifi has been incorporated in many big chain businesses. But independents are missing out.

Here are three reasons why free wifi can really help your in-store experience, bring in more customers and keep them happy.

Attract More Customers

Having an internet connection makes people feel more comfortable. Customers will feel more at home in a store that doesn’t break their connection to the web, to their friends and family. It’s no surprise that customers tend to stay longer in places where free Wi-Fi is offered. Comfortable customers are also more likely to recommend you to their friends. This means more foot traffic into your business and more happy customers to continue the good word of mouth to other shoppers.

Another Means of Marketing

Something that isn’t often thought about with public wifi is the mechanism by which your customers sign in to your wifi. Some wiifi providers let you customise a landing page for your business. This lets you show different real-time offers to customers as they’re signing in. This is another dimension to your marketing you can use to show shoppers the products they might have missed walking around your shop. You can even use your wifi service to complement your in-store experience, expanding your marketing space for customers that use your public wifi.

Let Your Customers Spread the Word

With access to wifi in your shop, your customers will be able to connect with their friends, family and the random strangers that they’ve added on Facebook. This means they’ll be talking to all these people while they’re inside your shop, surrounded by your products. Letting your customers talk to their friends while they’re in your shop means you’re letting them talk about you. You’re letting them share photos of your products to their social media. You’re letting them spread the word about your shop. And what’s more, if they’re in your shop, they probably fit your customer profile. This means their friends, that they’ll be spreading the to, are also likely to be your kind of customer.

Check out our article on public wifi, featuring XLN, one of the UKs foremost public wifi providers.

Have a look at our special offer on public wifi for your shop.

If you have any questions or thoughts on public wifi, get in touch with us here.

The post What Free Wifi Can Do For Your In-Store Experience first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post What Free Wifi Can Do For Your In-Store Experience appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

The internet is for everyone. While there are certain groups of people that are more internet-active than others, everyone is online these days. By selling online, you open your shop up to a huge market of people from all walks of life. The internet is the biggest market of shoppers in history. By connecting with this incredible marketplace, you can grow sales and your customer base to a far greater degree than if you only exist offline. Once you’re “e-commerce” enabled, you can sell well beyond the borders of your usual consumer base.

And really this is one of the biggest advantages to e-commerce. You aren’t limited by your physical shop. Are you in a bit of a poky, hard to reach location? Not a problem online. Do you have a narrow storefront, overshadowed by larger shops on either side? Your online storefront has no such problems. This is one of the ways that e-commerce can help you level the playing field with big chains.

Of course, this isn’t to say that e-commerce is easy. And at the end of the day, it’s got to be your decision, for your shop. But below we’ve listed a few ways that e-commerce can help you grow your business, to help you see what e-commerce can do for you.

E-Commerce Improves Availability

All brick-and-mortar shops have an opening time and a closing time. Some big chains can stay open all-day, but this takes a big staff that most independents can’t afford to maintain. This means that there are long periods of time each day (or more accurately each night) when you aren’t selling. And these days more and more people are getting online, in the later hours of the day, and browsing products from the comfort of their own homes. Using e-commerce eliminates the limitation of ‘open hours’ as it remains open 24/7, letting shoppers shop at their own convenience.

Unlimited Customer Reach

Whatever you put on the internet is for the world to see. Unlike physical stores that are limited to their physical area, e-commerce has no such limitation to how wide your customer reach can be. E-commerce provides increased visibility and sales by letting everyone that’s looking for your products online find you. Even when you’re targeting a niche audience, you’re guaranteed to expand beyond your shop’s physical area. And since shoppers don’t have to make it to your shop to browse your products, you’ll be gaining loyal customers across the country. Shoppers a hundred miles away will be browsing your products from the comfort of their own beds. Which brings us to what, for most consumers, is the best part of e-commerce.

Easy, Convenient Purchases

Shopping online is convenient. That’s its real strength. There are plenty of downsides to shopping online, like having to buy a product without actually seeing it in person and without being able to talk to a shop assistant if you have any special wants or requirements. It’s also lacking the personal touch of the in-store experience and you don’t get any of the atmosphere or community that a physical shop might have. But by God is it more convenient.

It’s more convenient for customers to stay at home and place an order from the comfort of their bed, rather than travelling all the way out to a store. There’s no waiting in line and you don’t need any cash either. With recent advances in in-browser information storage, you don’t even have to enter your card deals separately for every purchase. Every product you could ever want to buy is just a few clicks away. E-commerce skips the stress of pushing a shopping cart and looking for the product everywhere in the store. It lets you find what you’re looking for via a search function, so you don’t have to wonder through all the products you aren’t interested in.

So Why Not Give it a Try?

At the end of the day, e-commerce is a great opportunity to facilitate sales. It’s a great way to just let your customers buy. Let them browse from home, even if they live far away, or are usually too busy to shop. Let them buy with a few clicks of their mouse and a few taps of the keyboard. Let your customers shop the way they want to shop and you’ll see your sales grow. You might also see your footfall rise with your sales. A little online notoriety can bring customers in and if someone made a purchase, who wouldn’t otherwise have found you, or wouldn’t have been willing to travel out to your shop, you might find that happy customer visiting you in-store in future.

If you have any questions about e-commerce or getting online, feel free to get in touch!

The post What e-commerce can do to help grow your business first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post What e-commerce can do to help grow your business appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

“Consumers want Wifi on the High Street, for the same reason as we want it at home. It’s almost like a God-given right”

The world has changed a lot since the creation of the internet. The modern consumer all-but lives online. Even while shoppers are walking around your store they want to access the net. Customers want to be able to send and receive messages from their friends. They want to be able to check their social media and emails. It’s something modern shoppers are used to having at their fingertips and they don’t expect that to change when they step into your shop.

Some shoppers have jobs that require them to be accessible at all times, in case of emergency. Some shoppers have significant others that require them to be permanently connected online. Others are just addicted to social media and want to be able to post their every move, as they move. Giving these people access to the net means they don’t need to break their online connection to visit your shop.

For many other people though, it’s not so much that they need to check messages and send emails. Rather it’s lacking a connection that makes them uncomfortable. These shoppers won’t necessarily spend much time online, in your shop, but if they know they can’t they won’t be as comfortable in your shop.

Why do I want my customers to be comfortable? We’re a shop, not a spa

Comfortable customers will be in less of a hurry to leave. Which in turn means they’ll spend morecustomer experience money, as well as time, in your shop. Taking a longer look at your products, comfortable in your in-store experience. Meanwhile a customer that isn’t comfortable, or is raring to leave your shop so they can reconnect with their friends online, will spend less time, less money and be less likely to come back to your shop again. Comfortable customers are happy customers and happy customers become loyal customers.

And there are some hidden perks…

Give your customers internet access and what will they do? Statistically speaking they’ll be messaging their friends and browsing social media. Why is this a good thing? Because when they message their friends they’ll be talking about you. When they post on their Facebook they’ll be posting about you. When they take selfies and Snapchat with their friends, they’ll be spreading pictures of your shop, with your products all around them.

Giving your customers free wifi access might be the best social-media decision you ever make. It gives them the power to spread the word about you to all their friends and family on the internet. It lets your customers advertise your shop and your products. Even if someone takes a picture of an interesting product and doesn’t buy it. The friends that they share that picture with are all customers in waiting. You might find that a customer has posted about a product that isn’t quite their style, but they know someone it would be perfect for. These shoppers will send the picture to their friend and do as good a better job of marketing your product than any marketing scheme.

Check out this special offer on wifi from XLN, for SaveTheHighStreet.org members.

If you’d like to know more about what wifi can do for your shop, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The post Make Your Customers Feel at Home – Give Them Free Public Wifi first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post Make Your Customers Feel at Home – Give Them Free Public Wifi appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.

With Expressly, retailers only pay on results – you only pay on what you sell. And Expressly is offering SaveTheHighStreet.org members £200 worth of fees covered on any paid campaign online campaign!

Sign up with Expressly for free and get £200 worth of fees covered for any paid campaign.

Fill in the form below to take advantage of this offer…

The post Smooth Payments For Your Customers Online and Connect With the Expressly Network first appeared on Savethehighstreet.org.

The post Smooth Payments For Your Customers Online and Connect With the Expressly Network appeared first on Savethehighstreet.org.