Are you a brick and mortar retailer considering adding a digital shopping cart to your website? If so, this article is for you. We’ll discuss the digital shopping cart benefits to your existing website and how successful retailers improve furniture sales with the online shopping cart.
Increase Online Furniture Sales with a Digital Shopping Cart
The most obvious benefit is the ability to increase online furniture sales with a digital shopping cart. Many brick and mortar retailers used the online shopping cart feature before our global pandemic. Research shows that shopping cart kept many furniture retailers above water when stores were closed. A digital shopping cart gives your customer the opportunity to shop for your furniture when you’re not open. Think of the online shopping cart like a new retail location of your store. It needs the same time and attention to make it successful.
MicroD retailers success with digital shopping cart
Our data reports that brick and mortar furniture retailers with a digital shopping cart on average increased the number of online orders from January through June 2020 compared to the first half of 2019. During the worst of the pandemic shutdowns, these retailers closed their doors by state and local regulations but still kept business going.
Flexibility to Sell Certain Products Online
Here’s what most retailers don’t know about a digital shopping cart.
Retailers are worried about pricing thousands of products manually to get your digital shopping cart ready. But that’s not the case. One great benefit of a digital shopping cart is having the flexibility to price products in your own strategic way. If you’re using the ecommerce shopping cart to supplement your brick and mortar revenue, you have more flexibility.
MicroD brick and mortar retailers see success with eCommerce based on their goal. We have retailers with as few as 10% of their online products priced for a digital shopping cart. The average monthly revenue from online sales is less than other eCommerce retailers. However, these retailers built a sustainable strategy to use their accessory lines and in-store inventory for an online shopping cart. As they identify more products and best sellers to price online and coordinate shipping, those products get priced and now can be purchased online. On average, MicroD retailers with an adding digital shopping cart price about 35% of their online products and segment the majority of those products to be “available” for online furniture sales.
eCommerce success and the digital shopping cart depends on your strategic plans.
Digital Shopping Cart Benefits In-Store Sales
In the age of social distancing, in-store browsing has decreased. For many retailers, a restriction of hours or staffing caused the traffic to decrease. But one great benefit of the digital shopping cart is identifying qualified “window shoppers” for your store.
Just because you have a digital shopping cart doesn’t mean you have to transact online. Furniture retailers can increase in-store traffic from a digital shopping cart. MicroD retailers find the “quote a cart” option beneficial for in-store sales.
By enabling your website with pricing and a digital shopping cart, furniture shoppers can browse your website and add products to the cart. When the shopper is ready to purchase, they schedule an appointment in the brick and mortar store to complete checkout.
Bring Abandoned Customers Back to Buy
When you have a digital shopping cart on a retail website, you’re going to see abandoned orders. Shoppers abandon carts for many different reasons. We wrote an abandoned cart article about it in more detail. And that information is a gold mine for brick and mortar retailers. In some cases, the abandoned cart is completed at the store. But most of the abandoned digital shopping carts represent an opportunity to remarket those shoppers and bring them to the store.
If you’re not showcasing price on the products, shoppers will add the product to the cart and look for a quote. When they abandon these carts, your in store sales staff can make contact with the shoppers by phone to recapture the sell. Every abandoned cart is a new lead opportunity for your sales staff. While store hours are limited and restrictions keep staff interactions with customers limited, use your digital shopping cart for leads.
Access to New eCommerce Brands
This last benefit is unique and untapped by many home furnishings retailers. When it comes to brands and collections for furniture sales, retailers buy from the brands with existing relationships. But when you add a digital shopping cart, it changes which brands are going to be your best sellers (online). The best seller in your store may not likely be your best seller online if you’re unable to price it for profitability. Retailers need to consider logistics and shipping with the added IMAP pricing from the manufacturer.
But adding a digital shopping cart brings more brands to the table for online orders. During the pandemic, we saw furniture manufacturers create accessible drop ship collections or products for ecommerce enablement. For example, Flexsteel announced homestyles by Flexsteel to serve retailers who wanted to have an ecommerce-ready brand for online sales. This allows a furniture retailer to continue selling furniture in the store and sell great furniture products online that have the supply chain logistics for online shopping carts.
Future Benefits of a Digital Shopping Cart
We don’t know the future of the furniture store and in-person shopping. But we do know that the supply chain has been significantly impacted by the coronavirus. In store shopping continues to have its limitations. And retailers are feeling the impacts, according to Furniture Today sales reports from May 2020. If you are a furniture retailer seriously considering a digital shopping cart to supplement your revenue, please contact us or read more content to make your strategic decision.
