Showrooming consists in going inside a physical store to see a product, to touch it and to receive advice from the seller. After that, consumers go online to buy the product at a more competitive price. This new trend is harmful to retailers who observe a decrease in their incomes. Stimulated by price differences, more than 31% of consumers would leave the store is they find a price difference of around 5%.
Showrooming is a threat for retailers but how can they face it? How can retailers hold back their shoppers?
Here are 4 tips to fight against showrooming!
Tip 1: Offer an awesome customer experience
To beat showrooming, retailers have to focus on customer experience in order to make it more modern, catchy and unforgettable. Customers can buy anything at anytime from anywhere (it can be offline or online) and from any place. That’s why retailers have to offer more than just the possibility to buy something in their stores. Shop managers have to move away from the traditional way of selling things. In order to make shopping more fun, modern and attractive, retailers may include technology in their stores by digitalized them with several trendy features.
Tip 2: Train the sales team to become real experts
What a pure player cannot offer are the individual interactions between shoppers and sellers. Retailers must therefore hire and constantly train a dynamic and expert team of vendors. Moreover, these sellers have to change their mentalities. They cannot just sell the products anymore. They have to respond to all customers’ wishes and to anticipate their wants and needs. A seller may anticipate consumers’ tastes such as colours for example.
Tip 3: Develop a detailed and efficient website
In order to drive traffic to their stores, retailers have to facilitate access to information by developing an efficient and complete website (a mobile website is even better!). Indeed, consumers, before going to physical stores, are going online to search for information about points of sale or about products’ offer or characteristics. If they can’t find online the information they are searching for, 70% will not visit the point of sale. Also, retailers have to spread all their points of sale’s information on all platforms such as social networks (Facebook, Foursquare) and Google Maps among others.
Tip 4: Eliminate barriers encountered by in-store consumers
Many customers are annoyed to go to stores because of lack of parking spots, inadequate layout of the store, too long waiting time at checkout, etc. Retailers have to change and perfect all these small details that will certainly improve consumers’ shopping experiences.
CONCLUSION:
These tips are 4 examples among many others. Retailers do not need to invest in major changes in their stores. Sometimes, changing some small details is enough and can completely change consumers’ opinions about the store.
But before fighting against showrooming, you need to attract customers inside your stores. Therefore, your stores must be well referenced on the web! Check here if your stores are correctly placed on the web:
