Your online store represents the lifeblood for your entire enterprise. Whether it remains a relatively small operation – and comprises only a small part of your overall business – or has come to handle the overwhelming majority of transactions between your business and clients, the fact remains that ensuring you are streamlining every stage in the process, and making certain that it is getting the promotion it deserves, is one of the most important aspects for growth.
Of course, streamlining your online store goes far beyond the checkout process, and extends into the realm of managing everything that goes on behind the scenes – and the line of communication between you and your physical inventories.
Similarly, promoting your online business is something that extends beyond the digital realm, and filters into everyday life – and the customers visiting your brick and mortar business.
For this reason, opting to utilise intuitive point of sale solutions capable of creating one unified inventory and product catalog, of bridging the disconnect between your online and in-person sales – and, of course, the disconnect between your POS hardware and e-commerce software – is the best way of managing the steady flow of sales, not to mention growing demand. In this way, multiple strands can be combined together within one app, on one device, rather than being left to trail off into thin air and cause bigger problems for you further down the line.
As a result, a POS solutions app offers the most efficient and scalable way of enabling companies straddling both in-person sales and e-commerce to streamline their processes, and prevent anything from being ‘lost in translation’ between the two areas of sales.
Read more about managing and promoting your online store from a POS solutions app, below.
Management
It may be the case that your online store is only half the story. And, while managing both a brick-and-mortar store and an online sales platform holds a long list of potential benefits for your business – not least among them, of course, is the fact that you can reach innumerable customers online while still reaping the benefits of in-person sales – it can make ensuring that those separate inventories and product catalogs align with one another incredibly laborious – and that’s putting it mildly.
The only way to create a middle ground from which both sides of the business can benefit is to focus on both points of sale, and to ensure that they are united within one piece of software – a POS solutions app that is able to draw together data from each side of the business.
From this one application, you can ensure that every aspect of running two separate, though interconnected, points of sale are merged seamlessly together, and that spreading yourself between online and in-person sales does not create a shortfall in which opportunities for growth are lost.
From here, the two separate concerns of store management and promotion can also be integrated together.
Promotion
There are, of course, various ways of promoting your business online. From garnering a greater following on social media marketing, to ensuring that your in-person shoppers are aware of the digital side of your business, anyone attempting to see genuine and lasting growth via their online sales platform will stand to benefit from investing as much time and attention as possible into promoting this site.
Still, this represents another area of business management that will garner the most benefit from an approach that considers the brick-and-mortar side of the business, as well as the digital.
For instance, one of the most beneficial marketing tactics for online stores is offering promotions and discount codes, as a means of enticing existing customers back onto your product pages, and encouraging first-time customers to commit to an initial order, too.
My utilizing a solution that integrates the physical with the digital, then, you can ensure that those same promotional tools are valid for in-person shoppers, too. Doing so will mean that those key customers return to both sides of the business with greater frequency, and that both points of sale offer similar benefits to customers.
Final Thoughts
Keeping on top of the management and promotion of your online store via a single app is, without a doubt, a daunting venture – even for those who have garnered years’ worth of experience in the e-commerce market already. The daily tasks and chores are, for a growing business, enough to keep your plate permanently full – and that’s before you even consider the additional work it takes to ensure continued, steady growth online.
When it comes to integrating together the processes that keep your on- and offline stores going, however, the process gets even more difficult – unless, of course, you commit to a solution that serves both sides of the business in equal measure, rather than focusing on just one, and leaving the other to flounder on its own.
