Beyond brick and mortar for SMB’s

Brick and mortar or physical stores are still the way to get start a small business for a lot of communities across the country. A lot of these business have ambitious plans to build their store and expand it beyond their first location. However seldom think about how to get beyond brick and mortar. Today’s digital world require you to go beyond your instore strategies. This post outlines some quick ways you can adopt beyond brick and mortar

Online Store

This is the quick way you can expand your channel. The easiest way is to start an online store and have start selling there . Modern retail software allows you to start online store with a few clicks without any server cost of huge maintenance. You can either use your existing site or provision a new website to do this.

Pro Tip : Use a smaller web address even if you have a long business name . This is way to remember

Buy Online Pick up in store ( BOPIS )

Online store these days are not just for online shipments. You can have Buy online and pickup instore strategies without any additional cost. These are sometimes very useful for busy shoppers where they can get orders picked up same day. BOPIS also offers Pay online or Pay in store capabilities.

Sell Products in Social media platform for Commerce

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchats have become an essential part of people’s life. They also offer ways you can sell products. When you take a nice picture of your products, get your likes and if you can have your customers buy directly from that picture it would be awesome. This is what these social platform enables with commerce.

According to hootsuite here are some statistics about  Instagram . If your business targets any of these demographics you know that it is right time to get into the Instagram commerce

• 1 billion people use Instagram. …
• 39% women, 30% men, for U.S. Instagrammers. …
• 59% of U.S. users are under 30. …
• 72% of teens use Instagram, every day. …
• 35% of online adults use Instagram. ..

Online Marketplaces

How can you sell beyond your store, online store social media ?. The answer is market places. Everyone knows that amazon is the biggest online seller of eCommerce products.  Did you know that you can also sell through amazon marketplace. Moreover did you know that you can have the products displayed across all the channels and have a single inventory view.

retailcloud online provides capability to give your instore into another dimension with  and set of channels with a single Inventory view. You can sell products in store, online, facebook , instagram and marketplaces through retailcloud online.