Offline to Online: Making Ecommerce a Natural Extension of Your Brick-and-Mortar Business

The events of 2020 (and now 2021) have had a profound impact on shopping behaviour and the retail industry. Many businesses moved online for the first time or expanded their online presence. In fact, ecommerce share of the retail market increased as much in the first half of 2020 as in the last five years. 

And it isn’t just small businesses undergoing a digital transformation. Survey data from McKinsey indicates that businesses globally have accelerated the digitisation of customer interaction by about three years.

Even when physical retail stores are back to business as usual, the lasting effects of COVID-19 on retail sales will still loom large. If you have a physical store (or several), it may be time to bring your brick-and-mortar store into the world of online shopping. If you have an existing ecommerce store that hasn’t received enough love, now is a great time to make sure it’s a robust channel that can complement your offline brand as part of an omnichannel strategy.

You’ve probably noticed that there are dozens of SaaS products in the market claiming to ease your transition into ecommerce. But how do you navigate this experience and maximise your resources? How do you find the right tools and deploy them for maximum efficiency?

There are two major pieces to this approach:

• Lay the groundwork with pre-launch preparation.
• Optimise and market your online store.

This article will delve into these steps in detail, and you’ll learn how to build an online shop that can work together with your offline store perfectly as part of your overall retail strategy. 

We’ll also look at how five ecommerce professionals were able to transition from brick-and-mortar to online shopping.

• Tommy Ekstrand, BigCommerce designer and SEO specialist.
• Rohan Moore, founder and CEO of UK fashion company, Olive Clothing.
• Tahnee Elliott, founder and CEO of T.C. Elli’s fashion company in the United States.
• Becky Sunseri, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of California-based scoop shops Tin Pot Creamery. 
• Courtney Harris, Director of Operations of Boston-based fashion brand Sara Campbell.

There’s a lot of planning that goes into building a successful ecommerce website, which is why you shouldn’t rush into building your virtual storefront without first doing some strategic planning.

Before anything else, you need to answer the following questions:

1. Who are your primary customers?
2. How will they find your website?

For Tahnee Elliott, identifying and servicing her primary market was especially easy.

“Being in a college town, we have a lot of transient customers who go home during the summers and holidays,” she said.

“The primary objective of launching the online store was to give these customers a chance to buy our clothing while they were away from school for the summer.” Boston-based fashion brand Sara Campbell had to quickly pivot to add an online channel for the first time when COVID-19 caused their 26 brick-and-mortar locations to close. While initially concerned how their existing customer base would respond to the change, they were pleasantly surprised to find their audience was receptive to the new channel.

As Courtney Harris, Director of Operations at Sara Campbell recalls: “Upon launch, we received great results and feedback from existing customers that this had been something they were waiting for. The implementation and launch itself was also rather quick — our retail stores closed on March 17th, 2020, and we launched BigCommerce on March 26, 2020.”

Generally speaking, primary customers are going to be the ones who’ve already been consistently shopping at a brand’s brick-and-mortar store. This existing customer base is a major advantage, as businesses can get a running start with an audience that’s already interested in the brand. 

Your ecommerce store will be able to have a larger reach than your physical presence, but it will likely appeal to much of the same customer base you’re used to serving in person. This is another reason, it’s important for your online and offline stores to work together as one clear integrated brand.

The next challenge is determining how to redirect focus to your online presence — and to do this, you need to pick a domain name where people can find you in the digital environment.

There are two ways you can go about picking your domain name:

1. Choose a catchy, SEO-friendly name that will resonate with your audience.
2. Stick with your current brand name.

Both approaches have their advantages. An SEO-driven domain name gives you a chance to:

• Extend your physical store brand in a new way
• Create an online marketplace that’s optimised for organic ranking and traffic.

The downside of choosing a new domain name is that you won’t be able to capitalise on the brand awareness you’ve developed with your brick-and-mortar business.

With that said, choosing the right SEO-friendly domain name can make it easier for your company to reach a larger audience — especially when combined with a site that’s been optimised for text and voice search.

When BigCommerce designer Tommy Ekstrand helped his father come up with an online marketplace for their brick-and-mortar paint store, they decided to go with a new domain name that was appealing to a wider audience.

“We ended up with an SEO-friendly version: US Paint Supply. We’ve owned the family name website since 1998, but that site is purely informational. The decision to go with a more SEO-friendly domain was to find something more universal across our selling area (U.S. target audience).”

Ultimately, if your online marketplace depends on organic traffic, you might want to drop your brick-and-mortar name in exchange for something more SEO-friendly.

While it can be more work in the beginning stages as you create more awareness around your digital brand, it can help your brand in the long run as your organic SEO ranking increases more quickly.

Ideally, your inventory or services should be strategically chosen to appeal to a broader audience — especially when you’re just starting out.

If you’ve got a wide selection of products to choose from in your brick-and-mortar store, we recommend narrowing your inventory down to approximately 100 of the best-selling items for your online marketplace.

“We started with offering tops, bottoms, shoes, dresses, and rompers,” said Tahnee.

“Of course, we added more as needed and reorganised so our list of categories and subcategories evolved based on demand and trends.”

When choosing products to carry online, make sure to choose items which are:

• Top sellers in your brick-and-mortar store.
• Items you receive special requests or calls for 2-3x per month.

Another great way to optimise your online inventory is by stocking it with products that are nationally popular. That way, you’re able to start out with an appeal to a wider audience (rather than only targeting specific segments of the market).

If you have a large catalog that you’re hoping to get launched or expanded quickly, you won’t have time to write product descriptions for potentially 100 plus items.

Besides, full-length descriptions aren’t something you exactly want to rush through.

Fortunately, you can quickly come up with a collection of meta descriptions and page titles to get your online marketplace operational in the meantime.

Here’s how:

1. Compile all your products and product data into a CSV file.
2. Use the following format for titles and meta descriptions:{Product Name} is a {type of product or category} used in/for {primary uses}.

If your product happens to come in various sizes and colors, or if it’s important that your buyer knows its dimensions, add those details in the meta description.

Remember: Your page titles and meta descriptions aren’t supposed to be in-depth.

You just want to get something custom on the page that highlights what you’re retailing. 

As you expand your site and make it a stronger sales channel, you can always revisit and refine your descriptions over time, expanding them after the site is up and running.

Using original photos rather than stock pictures can give you a much-needed SEO boost.

If you have a basic camera or smartphone, you can take professional-grade product photography for your store. All you need is a piece of white paper to use as a background.

“Original images and image descriptions helped us to rank far above other retailers using stock photos. Having alt tags on all images is absolutely necessary,” Tommy commented.

“Most of the time it’s just the product name and maybe “- Front” or “- Back” or “- Side.” Since I sell paint, some examples are ‘C2 LUXE Gallon in Satin’ and ‘C2 LUXE Quart in Eggshell.’”

If you’re working in an industry like fashion or design, you’ll need to schedule extra time to take quality product pictures — especially if your website involves models.

For Tahnee, who worked in an aesthetically-driven industry, taking pictures of inventory was one of the more time-consuming processes.

“Next step was taking quality product pictures, which required investing in quality equipment and sourcing: a camera, tripod, professional lights, professional background, models, learning how to edit pictures, and training an employee to help.Since we’re a clothing boutique, we’re heavy into visual aesthetics, which needed to reflect our branding.

Of course, I thought I had a great game plan but soon found out I needed a lot more training and equipment. Studying at night about photography, lighting, and modelling poses became a six-month undertaking.”

Also, regardless of your industry, you may want to consider purchasing photo editing software like Photoshop and Lightroom.

Combined with a good quality camera, these tools are essential for creating attention-grabbing, lucid images that help your website stand out.

The last thing your customers want is to watch their total cost skyrocket at the end of checkout. Consumers don’t like unexpected fees, which is something you want to be mindful of when setting your shipping costs and other fees.

We recommend going with a flat rate on shipping, as well as offering free or discounted shipping for customers who spend a certain amount of money.

In the case of Tommy and his father, they offered free shipping on orders over $100.

“This helps our conversion rate by setting up total cost expectations right away and removing surprise costs during checkout.

It also helps with organic advertising in SERPs (search engine results page) as a quick callout to “Free Shipping.” Consider a meta description that says ‘Free Shipping over $100’ at the end of it.”

Research shows online shoppers are often deterred by additional costs that pop up during checkout.

This method helped boost sales by giving the customer a clear idea of how much they’ll pay throughout the entire purchasing journey.

For Becky Sunseri, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Tin Pot Creamery, found it was especially important to make shipping costs a priority given the intricacies of delivering a perishable product like ice cream. 

“When we first started shipping packages, we were just trying to make it work without a real plan in place,” explained Sunseri. “Having BigCommerce plugins that could help us calculate the shipping costs and print labels gave us so much control and made the process of trial and error much easier.” Here are some ways you can use shipping costs to drive sales and reduce abandoned carts on your website:

• Display shipping fees (as well as other expenses like taxes and processing fees) in a table on your website and/or item pages where customers can see.
• Offer free or discounted shipping for customers who spend above a certain amount.
• Add a line into your metadata to include the following in your item description: Free/DiscountedShipping on orders over ___ to encourage customers to spend more, and increase your AOV.
• Offer local customers options for BOPIS or click and collect, so they can save on shipping costs. This also encourages them to potentially buy more when they come into your physical store.

There are two things you should keep in mind when choosing your payment methods:

1. What’s the easiest payment method to set up?
2. How can you accommodate a wider audience?

Your ecommerce platform will usually offer connections to a number of popular payment gateways. For example, BigCommerce provides 65 payment gateways integrations out-of-the-box serving more than 95 countries, as well as integrations for the most popular digital and mobile wallets.

Additionally, you will want your POS system to integrate easily with your online store. When it comes to maximizing convenience, there are a number of great options for POS systems for ecommerce including Vend, Heartland Retail, ConnectPOS and Square. These can be integrated into your digital marketplace in a couple of minutes and sync with your brick-and-mortar inventory and checkout.

Moreover, connecting your POS with your BigCommerce store allows you to see all of your sales metrics in a single dashboard. Keep track of sales performance, inventory and more across your online and offline channels without having to manage multiple tabs.

Taxes and security are two things you want to make sure you have sorted before launching your store. Otherwise, you’ll run into issues later that could inhibit your growth and revenue.

The good news is that tax compliance has never been easier with the help of programs like:

• Avalara: Designed to help ecommerce businesses of all sizes, Avalara automates calculations, exemptions and filings to ensure that your company is tax compliant from day one. Also, its platform comes ready to integrate with more than 600 ecommerce and ERP applications.
• TaxJar: Like Avalara, TaxJar automates filings, reporting and sales tax calculations to ensure that your business doesn’t make any unnecessary compliance slip-ups. Moreover, TaxJar is trusted by more than 10,000 organizations, including Coca-Cola, Dell and the American Cancer Society.

You also want to make sure that your customers’ information is protected from data breaches. This can be done by adding an SSL certificate to your website. BigCommerce offers free SSL certificates to all digital stores regardless of service plan and can easily walk you through the process of securing your digital marketplace.

“This is when I got into the other details of setting up an online store, including taxes – we use Avalara – importing products, and installing an SSL,” said Tommy.

“This is all standard stuff and the BigCommerce backend walks you through these.”

Unless your brick-and-mortar store is already a nationally recognised brand, you’re going to need to spend time building relationships with your customers.

One way to build trust between you and your shoppers is by being upfront about your shipping and refund policies.

• Create a webpage highlighting your shipping and return policies, as well as any other important information the customer should know.
• Provide links to frequently asked questions (FAQs) in your emails to customers.

When asked about ways to improve customer service and work more efficiently, Tommy mentioned the importance of linking to shipping and refund-related FAQs in his emails.

“By providing links in emails, we were able to prevent additional contacts through our customer support channels.

Typical questions were ‘What does this status mean’ or ‘When is my order going to ship’ or ‘I need to return this,’ so making sure that those things are right up front in their emails they receive helps to deflect that stuff. It saves us time and cuts service costs in the long-run.”

• Make it easy for customers to return their products. Give shoppers a generous timeframe to return their items — we recommend a 20-day return window.

For many customers, returning online purchases can feel like a hassle.

Coming up with a refund policy that makes returns more efficient is an important step towards building customer loyalty and increasing conversion rates.

BigCommerce offers a Return Request feature, which gives customers a return shipping label when they complete a return request online.

When asked about her return policy at T.C. Elli’s, Tahnee had this to say:

“We wanted our brick-and-mortar return policy to be reflected online as well. BigCommerce offered a Return Request option which worked great for us!

Customers would need to complete a return request in order to receive a return shipping label from us. This way, we could confirm the item wasn’t past the 20-day return window.”

Another way to make shipping more convenient is to use reusable boxes.

Eco-friendly packaging company, Ecoenclose, has solved this problem by creating resealable boxes. This lets customers return their purchases in the same box they received.

Taking a more practical approach, Rohan Moore believes that good shipping starts with inventory management.

“For most retail products, warehouses are best organised with stacks of picking bins that can be numbered and labeled, so you know what’s where when fulfiling orders.

I’d recommend adopting these principles early, even if your ‘warehouse’ is a cupboard under the stairs.”

After your website is up and running, it’s time to build upon the framework you created in the days leading up to your store launch.

This is where you’ll start to focus on the aesthetics of your site, as well as continue the ongoing process of building good SEO content.

Unless you’re in a field like design or fashion, you don’t need to have an overly flashy website, as long as it has a clean, easy-to-use customer experience.

With that said, you don’t want to neglect your website design completely — it still needs to look professional.

BigCommerce makes it easy to customise your storefront with Page Builder. This drag-and-drop visual editing tool allows you to seamlessly create and edit any pages on your website with no coding required. Page Builder can help your store get up and running faster and enable you to create tailored pages that support your brand’s offline presence as well. After publishing, you can continue to make quick changes to your online storefront.

If you have more specific custom needs, you can also use an agency to achieve the exact look and feel you’re going for.

One aspect you really need to focus on is mobile responsiveness.

• Google prioritises sites that are optimised for mobile devices.
• Customers are 62% less likely to purchase from sites that aren’t optimised for mobile devices.

In today’s market, it’s absolutely essential for your ecommerce site to be mobile responsive. If not, you run the risk of turning away new and returning customers.

Look at ways you can improve your website’s design and improve user experience (UX).

Customers buy online for convenience, so it’s only natural that your website should be designed to make the shopping experience as convenient as possible.

A good customer service policy doubles as an effective conversion strategy.

For this reason, Rohan recommends launching your website with a ticketing system in place.

“Similarly with customer services, you’ll get in a mess with customer queries over orders and returns without a formal ticketing system. Integrate one from the outset — don’t believe that an organised inbox will suffice.”

Here are some other ways you can increase conversions through design optimisation:

• Reduce the number of clicks in your checkout by defaulting to guest checkout or pre-selecting shipping methods.
• Organise your inventory into categories and subcategories based on demand or market trends.
• Arrange your menu items into easy-to-understand categories.
• Include trust seals like: SSL certificates, accepted credit cards and payment gateway.

Now that all the heavy work is out of the way, it’s time to start improving your product descriptions.

While your meta descriptions did a fine job directing traffic to your website, there’s nothing more effective than a rich product description that captures the visitor’s attention to increase organic traffic — especially when the right keywords are used.

“Product descriptions were fairly straightforward and simple until we discovered that keyword-rich descriptions benefited the customer in their buying journey,” suggested Tahnee.

“It decreased the number of customer service phone calls and emails, which were few and far between at first but gradually ramped up in 2014 and 2015.”

But there’s more to effective product descriptions than good SEO. You also want to summarise your products in a way that connects with your customers.

Here’s how:

• Be consistent with your style.
• Use well-written headlines that capture the reader’s attention.
• Use bullet points to summarise important information and product specifications.

Developing SEO-driven content isn’t something you do once off — it’s an ongoing process.

In the beginning, focus on inbound marketing techniques:

• Build content.
• Engage with customers on social media.
• Write SEO-driven product descriptions.

A large part of what makes ecommerce websites successful is the content. You want to always have fresh, meaningful content that benefits your readers in one way or another.

Here are some ways you can create content that adds value to your site:

• Add content onto your brand pages using banners so that your products remain above the fold.
• Include short descriptions in your category pages. Be brief enough to keep products above the fold.
• Create an FAQ page to drive traffic from people searching Google for similar questions.

Also, if you ever get any questions related to a specific product, consider adding the question and answer in your FAQ page or as part of a product description. This will help direct more traffic to your site from people looking for specific products.

Google Search Console (GSC) lets you compare a list of keywords on your site with a list of keywords users commonly search for, as well as see just how many impressions your keywords are getting.

To do this, simply:

• Go to the Search feature and turn on all data times (CTR, clicks, impressions, position)
• Sort your keywords and phrases by impression, making note of which words and phrases are the highest ranking

From there, you’ll be presented with a ranked list of keywords and phrases which helps you see how well your keywords are performing.

When asked about increasing keywords impressions, Tommy had this to say:

“Know that moving from position 50 up to 10 or even 20 is going to be extremely difficult. Consider paying for these (AdWords) if you know they’ll convert.”

There are a number of other third-party tools that can help your business grow. However, Rohan warns against new businesses depending heavily on marketing and management tools.

“There is an ever-growing catalogue of SaaS products on the market, often promising solutions to growth and conversion that all e-com store owners are anxious to enhance.

It’s not a mistake to see e-com as an opportunity to expand sales without property costs, but SaaS is undoubtedly the new rent.”

When asked what tools he felt new online businesses should rely on, Rohan had this to say:

“To avoid the digital rent doing to the profitability of your website what your property rent already does to your bricks-and-mortar profitability, limit those SaaS subscriptions to three core products: your shopping cart, your warehouse management system, and your online customer services ticketing system.”

The benefit of GSC’s keyword is that it helps you get a better idea of the type of keywords and phrases potential customers are searching for.

You can then incorporate this information into your titles, product descriptions, meta descriptions and image tags for an added SEO boost.

You can even change product names and URL addresses to fit these keywords — just remember to implement a 301 redirect.

Outbound marketing still plays an important role in generating brand awareness and engaging with customers.

Here are some tools to help you reach out to loyal and prospective customers:

• Mail After Purchase (MAP) post-purchasing reviews from Yotpo surveys customers after they’ve made a purchase.
• Social Bribery widget by Justuno makes it easier for you to run incentivisation campaigns, rewarding your customers for sharing your products with their friends on social media.
• Use Smile.io to enrol customers in loyalty, VIP, and referral programs.
• Emailed coupon discounts for abandoned checkout carts.

When asked what he suggests new businesses spend their marketing budget on, Rohan placed value in marketing tools over outsourcing.

“Many fledgling (and some established) online businesses are enticed, for every £100 they spend in digital marketing, to pay another £100 to be told how to spend it.

Taking the wheel and spending all £200 on actual marketing will give you both results and experience that will form the backbone of your longer-term strategy.”

As you may have guessed, conversion rates is a topic that is constantly featured throughout this guide.

Converting visitors into loyal customers is how you’re going to grow your businesses, and it’s something that needs to be in the forefront of your mind as you design your website, interact with customers and come up with a solid marketing strategy.

Here’s how you can increase conversions while marketing your ecommerce site:

• Survey customers. Gather feedback from customers whenever you can, and include their feedback into your product descriptions and FAQ sections — especially if customers are inquiring about a product’s specifications. This will help the lurking visitors who want to learn more but are reluctant to contact your customer support.
• Use Google Analytics to pinpoint any drop-off points. If there’s ever a sudden dip in your website traffic, look at factors that could’ve caused it and correct any issues that inhibited your conversions.

Minimise your website loading time. More than half your visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Prevent this from happening by optimising your site for speed.

You already have a successful offline business that is earning customers. This can be a useful level in helping to drive traffic to your online business as well. When you’re combining online and offline marketing efforts, it’s important to make sure your graphics and messaging are consistent, so your campaign does not come across as disjointed.

Courtney Harris describes how Sara Campbell made marketing an important aspect of their newly created online channel. “Our first priority has been engaging with our customers through new and improved marketing campaigns and promotions,” said Harris. “BigCommerce has helped us with executing these promotions and allowing our online shoppers to complete a purchase while having an easy, excellent experience.”

Here are some suggestions for using offline marketing tactics to engage your online customers:

• If you’re holding an event as one of your stores, add a Twitter chat so non-local customers can participate. 
• If you’re running a tv or newspaper ad for your local store or stores, include a link to your website or Twitter hashtag.
• Encourage in-store customers to visit your website or spread the word about your store by offering coupon codes.

There’s a lot of work that goes into launching an ecommerce site that accompanies your brick-and-mortar store. But you can help make your launch go as smoothly as possible by remembering the following tips:

• The convenience and UX of your website are more important than looks. Give your customers a seamless website that’s quick and easy to navigate through. And don’t forget to include more than one type of payment option.
• Make SEO your top priority. Look at ways to incorporate keywords into your descriptions, metadata and headings. If you think it’s information that the customer would benefit from knowing, add it to your page.
• Be up front with your policies. Make sure customers are informed about your return policy, shipping fees and other expenses they may incur. Also, give them clear, step-by-step instructions on how they can return a product without them having to ask.
• Consumer preferences change over time, and if you don’t change with them, you’re not going to get the growth you’ve hoped for. Never stop optimising your website design, SEO content and marketing strategy for conversions.
• Focus on the important things first. Get your products online, create a site that works and implement a good SEO strategy. These three things need to be taken care of before you worry about making your site look visually appealing.
• Don’t be surprised if your online sales lag in the first couple of quarters after going live. In fact, many businesses report that following the initial launch of their ecommerce site, their brick-and-mortar stores benefit from a huge boost in sales as customers browse selections online and make purchases at the physical stores.

Ecommerce is continuing to expand its retail market share at a rapid rate, and that trend is likely to outlast the COVID-19 pandemic. Investing in a digital commerce strategy as a key part of your brick-and-mortar business will help future-proof your brand for whatever happens next.

If you’re interested in learning more about creating (or replatforming) an online store to support your overall retail strategy, learn more about how BigCommerce is making the offline to online experience easier.