A lot of things are having to change at the moment in light of covid. One thing that a lot of business owners are doing is starting to bring their businesses online as a means of ensuring that the company survives lockdown and beyond. If you run a retail store, you might find yourself particularly worried about this process, but as it happens this is a business where you can easily bring it online, as long as you know what to do. In this post, we’ll look at some of the essentials behind this process, to ensure that you know what you are doing.
By Team Savant
Image: Roberto Cortese
Choosing A Platform
Easily the best way to keep your stress to a minimum during all this is to choose a platform which you can use to get set up. Rather than building everything from scratch yourself, which takes a lot of technical knowhow and a lot of time, you can use a platform to do it all for you. Common ones are Shopify, Square and 3dcart, but there are many more to choose from. Do your research, find one that suits you and your needs, and get working with them to produce your online store.
Setting Up POS
You will probably already know plenty about the old-school methods of setting up point-of-sale in a physical store. But if you are setting up an online store, you are going to need to know how to set up POS online, and this is another matter altogether. In fact, the answer is to approach it in the same way you would approach the initial setup: simply find a provider to manage it all for you. Finding a trusted virtual payment system is going to save you untold hours of stress and many headaches, so it’s definitely something to think about.
Tracking Inventory
Image: Kelly Sikkema
One element which becomes a lot more difficult when you make the switch from physical store to e-commerce store is tracking your inventory. This is because you will likely be selling your products across a range of multiple channels. You therefore need to find a way to reliably track your inventory as you go, which is harder than it sounds. Most of this comes down to good forecasting, which requires the knowhow of those in the right position within each channel. If you have that, and a good inventorise process behind you, you can keep on top of things like shrinkage without too much trouble.
Shipping
A major challenge to running an online store is learning how to approach the issue of shipping. Your customers need their product to arrive fast, but they will also expect it to be affordable. This is a hard balance to strike, but it’s mostly a case of properly costing it out and changing the pricing of products where necessary to fill the gaps. Get that right, and you are going to have many happier customers, and a much more successful retail store in no time.