If your brick and mortar store is struggling due to COVID-19, the good news is you’re not alone. Between changing state and city regulations about how many customers you can have in your business at once and laws determining whether or not your business is essential, many small businesses have it especially hard. Thankfully, there are a variety of technologies that make it easier than ever to get started with eCommerce.
One of the most powerful things you can do is integrate your point of sale system with your eCommerce platform in order to better manage all angles of your business and sales. Here are three of the biggest reasons you should look for ways to integrate your POS system with your eCommerce platform.
eCommerce is gaining popularity with consumers.
When you look at how buyer behavior has changed because of COVID-19, eCommerce is clearly rising in popularity. In an article for Forbes, John Koetsier writes that because of the coronavirus, eCommerce has grown four to six years faster than it would have on its previous trajectory. For example, revenue from eCommerce was up over fifty billion as of June, Memorial Day sales increased by a whopping 75 percent compared to the previous year, and more consumers chose to buy online and pick up products in the store (growth of almost 200 percent).
All of these trends point to the fact that if you don’t have an online store yet and are still relying on in-person sales, you’re in trouble. As Taylor Schreiner, the Director of Adobe Digital Insights points out, “We are seeing signs that online purchasing trends formed during the pandemic may see permanent adoption.” As such, it’s vital that you get an online store set up as soon as possible in order to start generating an online presence for your retail efforts.
Integrating with your POS keeps things up-to-date.
One of the simplest ways to get things up and running is to integrate your eCommerce solution with your POS system. The right eCommerce point of sale platform has features that let you automatically create and populate your online store. This makes it easier than ever to keep inventory tracked properly, which can be a major hurdle for small businesses worried that a staff member handling this kind of work manually just wouldn’t cut it.
Platforms like NitroSell make it simple to integrate your POS or ERP with a beautifully designed eCommerce solution. This makes it incredibly straightforward to properly maintain your inventory by letting a POS user take a look at retail sales with just a few clicks, syncing your inventory in both your online store and retail store. The overall result is a seamless approach which harnesses your POS system to manage eCommerce sales, inventory management and keep things running smoothly.
eCommerce lets customers purchase wherever they are.
A major benefit of eCommerce is the opportunity it gives you to reach customers wherever they are. In the past, email marketing and even social media posts would have to encourage customers to swing by your store to take advantage of a sale. However, when you can run an online sale and customers can shop using their credit cards or debit cards online, you can make sales from anywhere in the world.
This sort of infrastructure is particularly powerful when you harness new technology like peer-to-peer texting services such as the platform offered by Peerly. With peer-to-peer texting, you can send out a message to your customers advertising a sale and then interact with customers using real human interaction if the customer responds to your P2P text. With Peerly and an eCommerce solution, not only can you make a sale through a P2P text message, but you can also answer customer questions. For example, perhaps you’re running a deal on shipping costs for all furniture, so you send out a text about it. Then, a customer is curious if that means that shipping costs are even waived if they select the “next business day” option. Through human interaction, you can have a real agent answer this question, even though your original P2P text was automated to be sent out.
