This article originally appeared on Payment Week. View it here.
On the surface, it looks like an idea whose sheer suicidal stupidity ranks right up there with anything that might earn a Darwin Award.
A new study from InMoment, meanwhile, suggests that this idea isn’t anywhere near that stupid, and actually represents a great potential way to boost sales. It’s mobile browsing, and it could be a big winner.
The InMoment study revealed that those who browse a retailer’s website while in the physical store tend to spend substantially more than those who don’t browse. How much more? A whopping 150 percent more, in fact, making this a strategy that must be considered.
This is supplemented by further word that says the average single-trip spending amount goes up almost four-fold when customers get engagement from both the physical store and the website.
Essentially, the notion that online shopping would kill brick-and-mortar only holds so much accuracy; users are turning to both simultaneously, looking for deals and information online and looking at the physical product in stores, a strategy that takes the best of all possible worlds and combines them together.
Thus, the astute retailer must consider having the necessary infrastructure on hand for users to browse the store’s website in the actual store itself.
Plus, the store’s materials need to mesh up exactly with the website, because inconsistencies will not be tolerated and confusion will be met with rapid abandonment.
For some time, there was a clear separation between the two concepts; online shopping had a lot more to choose from, and often at lower prices, but came with lengthy delays between order and shipment.
Physical store shopping fixed these problems, but lost the advantages of price and options that online offered. Some began to wonder if there were a way to combine the two, and now we’re starting to see just that.
This could be a welcome development for those who thought that thousands of cashier jobs would be lost forever, but it still requires some doing to make it happen positively. With attention paid to each side of the equation, the end result is a powerful new experience that delivers value for the customer, and sales for the retailer.