How Retailers Should React To The Decrease Of In-Store Shopping

Online shopping has been around for many years, and most of us utilize this option on a regular basis. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, online shopping has grown to become even more dominant.

This inspires the question, could in-store shopping ever fully disappear, paving the way for exclusively online shopping? And in either scenario, how do business owners best position themselves?

The Emerging Dominance of Online Shopping

It doesn’t take much analysis to understand why online shopping has become so dominant in recent years. Online shopping carries several advantages for shoppers. If you’re looking for a specific product, you can visit many different storefronts from many different companies in a matter of minutes to comparison shop and find the best price.

Oftentimes, you can find a much better deal online than you can find in-store. On top of that, you can quickly and easily do research to figure out customer reviews and the company’s reputation before you make a purchase. Ordering online is usually simple and the product may be delivered to your doorstep in less than a week.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced people to reconsider their in-person shopping habits, acclimating them to an environment where most of their shopping is done online. The emergence and development of better online shopping apps and other technology helped to solidify this trend.

How Business Owners Can Utilize Advantages of In-Store Shopping

Despite the advantages of online shopping, in-store shopping still has many advantages of its own. If you want your physical business to remain competitive in an era of online shopping, you’ll need to play to those strengths.

Immediacy

Online shipping might be fast, but it’s not immediate. When you buy something in the store, you can walk out with it and begin using it in a matter of minutes. For immediate needs, like food or clothing, online can’t yet close the gap.

As a business owner, you can use this to your advantage by offering quicker turnarounds, advertising your available stock, and heavily marketing items plagued by shortages or long shipping times.

Convenience

Some people find it more convenient to shop in person than to shop online. Visiting a store allows you to get many items you need at the same time without having to jump between different websites.

You can harness the power of this advantage by making things even more streamlined for your customers. Consider adjusting the layout of your business to be more customer-friendly or improving the convenience in other ways.

Inspiration and Idea Generation

If you know what you’re looking for, it’s easy to find it online, but what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? Physical storefronts are still better for inspiration and idea generation, like if you’re shopping for a gift or a solution to a very specific problem.

Customers will take care of this one mostly by themselves, but you can still help them with clever signage to help them find specific items or gift ideas for loved ones.

Physical Interaction and Experimentation

You can’t try things out online before you buy them unless they are digital goods. In a physical store, you can try out the product however you like. You can hold it in your hands, you can see it with your own eyes, and you might even be able to try it on or give it a test run. This gives consumers more confidence that they’re making the best decision.

Make sure you have plenty of products and samples available for your customers to try. This is also a great way to interact with your customer base directly!

Brand Visibility

For companies, a physical storefront provides an opportunity for brand visibility and marketability. If you have a storefront online, there’s no guarantee that people are going to see it or discover it unless you invest heavily in marketing and advertising. If you have a physical storefront, and a tall sign in front of it, everyone in the area will quickly learn of its existence.

Choosing a better location and investing in more externally visible showcases are great ways to take advantage of this. 

The Personal Touch

Some people prefer shopping in person because they get the personal touch. If they’re not sure of their purchasing decision or they need help with something, they can flag down a sales rep or another employee to get some assistance. Live chat online doesn’t provide the same benefit.

It’s essential that all your personal experiences go smoothly. Train your staff members to treat every customer like royalty — and get involved yourself by interacting with customers regularly!

What Would It Take for In-Store Shopping to Truly Disappear?

What would it really take for in-store shopping to totally disappear? In a free market, as long as there is sufficient demand for a given service, the service will continue to exist.

For that reason alone, it seems highly unlikely that in-store shopping would ever disappear, so long as there is one advantage over online shopping and a significant customer base to support that store’s existence. Given that framework, it may be possible for physical storefronts to decline even further, but they’ll probably never disappear — and adaptable business owners will continue thriving. 

Key Takeaways for Existing Business Owners

If you’re an existing business owner trying to manage a physical storefront, an online store, or both, these are your biggest takeaways from this assessment:

In-store shopping isn’t going away.

You don’t have to worry about closing your physical storefront anytime soon. Foot traffic may be down, and you might be facing significant competition from online counterparts, but the allure of an in-person shopping trip is too great to force you to close your doors for good.

Play to your strengths.

If you want to be more successful, you need to understand your strengths and emphasize them. If you have a physical storefront, you need to give shoppers the best in-person experience they could ask for. If you have an online storefront, you need to be highly competitive and make the experience as convenient as possible.

Prioritize your customers’ needs and preferences.

Different businesses need to do different things for their customer bases. Make sure you understand your target market well and optimize your business strategies to serve them specifically.

Remain adaptable.

Physical stores may be here to stay, but that’s not a guarantee that your business can survive changing market conditions. If you want to better serve your customers, guard against your competitors, and withstand Black Swan events, you’ll need to keep flexibly adapting your business. 

Online shopping has become a dominant business model, and it might become even more prevalent in the years to come, but in-store shopping still has its place, and its niche isn’t going away anytime soon. If you want to maximize your business’s chances of success, it’s important to optimize for both in-store and online shopping experiences and serve your customers the best way you can.