Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Providing a Positive Shopping Experience

The best way to encourage your in-store customers to also shop online is to make sure that all your sales processes work together. How customers buy goods from you — at the cash register or by way of an Internet Web browser — shouldn't affect how they can interact with you. When you combine the capabilities of your in-store and online processes, you can offer some interesting advantages to your customers that an online-only store never can.

Keeping friendly, flexible policies

Making the sales process smooth for your customers and giving them options for how the process works are effective ways to cultivate customer loyalty. Make sure that your online shoppers can pick up at your physical store any (or most) items that they buy online. Although many people thoroughly enjoy the convenience of shopping online, a lot of them are unwilling to pay the shipping charges to have items delivered to their house.

For other shoppers, the emphasis is on immediate gratification. That is, they see items online, click the Buy button, pay for the items with their credit card, and want to receive the items right away. In-store pickup allows these impatient shoppers to do just that — and it gives you a chance to sell them more items when they arrive to pick up their online purchases. Even big businesses are encouraging in-store pickup. For example, Walmart provides free shipping when customers order products at Walmart.com and use the Site to Store option to ...