Multi-Channel Retail
In order to grow, a retailer must employ three strategies - reach more customers, win more customers and retain and obtain repeat business from more customers.
These strategies must be facilitated and enabled by a capability to scale the operation with financial resources, human resources, infrastructure and business process automation.
Business process automation requires software specifically designed to automate the many activities associated with acquiring, selling to and supporting customers. ChannelGrabber are leaders in providing software that uniquely automates key retail business processes while simultaneously extending retail reach, fuelling customer acquisition and ensuring happier and more loyal customers.
In order to reach as many customers as possible a retailer must be accessible to them wherever they choose to shop and that inevitably means selling through their own webstore, eBay, Amazon and others – including smaller marketplaces like Etsy.
It is not sufficient to expose your products to customers wherever and whenever they may want to buy them. Retailers must strive to capitalise on every ad or listing “impression” or presentation to a potential customer and to do everything possible to convert an impression to a click and every click to a purchase. This involves making a series of steps to optimise online sales performance in order to win customers.
But since each sales channel functions differently and entirely separately, multi-channel online selling often leaves retailers feeling as though they are not managing one business but many. Webstores and marketplaces are nothing more than ecommerce web applications that require retailers to manage their product content, listings or adverts, stock, orders, billing, shipping and customer communications in silos. This in turn causes inefficiency, duplication of effort, wasted time, cost and errors that serve to undermine customer satisfaction.
eCommerce Content Optimisation
In order to maximise reach online, a retailer must optimise product content for each sales channel to capitalise on the data structures, available descriptive fields and the means of representing their product pictorially and with video. This ensures that products can be easily found and that customers are empowered to make a buying decision in their favour. ChannelGrabber understands the intricacies of each sales channel and how to optimise the product content format for each channel, helping you to win more customers.
eCommerce Listings or Advertisements
Optimised content must then be served up correctly to each sales channel. This a huge challenge because each channel has its own product categories and sub categories and each of these have their own listing templates requiring different fields to be populated. Accompanying images and videos must be uploaded to each listing, shipping methods and pricing must be set and much more. The solution is to automate the listing process using software that is capable of pushing product content to each and every channel in precisely the format in which it is required each and every time.
Advertised & ‘Boosted’ Listings
An optimised listing will only be seen if your customer goes searching for it on the respective sales channel. But a retailer may wish to selectively “boost” their listings to draw more eyes to them and ultimately, win more customers. This can be achieved manually by using paid advertising on Google Shopping, Amazon and Priceshopper.
Soliciting Repeat Business
When taking an order from a new customer via your webstore, it is easy enough for retailers to capture contact information – email address and telephone number - and confirm the customer’s willingness to receive promotional communications.
Marketplaces tightly control customer communication on their platforms and prevent direct communication by obscuring customer contact information. This makes it difficult to solicit repeat business from customers sourced beyond your own website.
ChannelGrabber has overcome this obstacle in two ways. Firstly by facilitating bi-directional communications directly via marketplaces and indirectly by harvesting email addresses from eBay and making these available for export to a retailer’s CRM, email marketing or marketing automation systems. This ensures that marketplace customers are as easy to market to as any other. The second approach leverages their capability to issue customers with invoices automatically following the purchase transaction. An invoice is not merely a record of a transaction, it can be used to enhance brand awareness, to promote your business, to convey messages about other products that may be of interest to the customer and to carry promotional codes to help incentivise repeat business.
ChannelGrabber helps retailers to win more customers by providing a single, fully-integrated system with one user interface, and one location from which you can manage every aspect of your online business.