22 Proven Examples of How to Increase Online Sales
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown both retailers and consumers the importance of eCommerce. While the pandemic showed up on our doorsteps earlier this year many retailers have been working on their eCommerce capabilities for many years now.
Some of the retailers that have risen to the challenge are Walmart, Target and Home Depot. The idea that Amazon is going to eat everyone’s lunch is yesterday’s news. These retailers which are all within the top ten of eCommerce retailers in the United States have all shown that they can build successful online businesses. They have also shown that the secret sauce to eCommerce success is stores. Services like buy online and pick up in stores have been embraced by consumers and are differentiators for retailers like Walmart which has a store located within 10 miles of 90% of the American population.
A seamless multichannel experience is clearly one of the keys to success but also consider these 22 examples as the ways the best in the eCommerce business are attracting and retaining customers.
Provide pickup lockers for customers to retrieve online orders
1. Home Depot has invested in pickup lockers by adding them to 1,300 stores where customers can pick up their eCommerce orders. This is a highly valued service with 95% of customers rating Home Depot’s pickup service five out of five stars. “[We] have seen a 250 basis point increase in checkout scores for stores with lockers versus those without” said Craig Menear, CEO of Home Depot.
2. Amazon Lockers are located in grocery and convenience stores, apartment buildings and malls and allow customers to pick up and return packages. Customers receive a unique code after they have made a purchase from Amazon that they can use to open their locker. The placement of these lockers in Whole Foods, for example, is likely to drive cross shopping as customers shop while on a trip to the store to pick up their packages. There are Amazon Lockers in more than 900 cities in the US.
Partner with retailers to offer more places for online order pickup
3. Last May Amazon launched a new service called Amazon Counter where customers can pick up their Amazon orders from other retailers’ brick and mortar locations. The hope for the partnering retailers is that when a customer arrives at their store to pick up their Amazon order they will stay awhile and buy other items.
Offer in-store and curbside pick up
4. Walmart has made a big bet on grocery pickup. It launched the service in 2014 and now more than 3,000 Walmart stores offer grocery pickup. Offering grocery pickup provides shoppers with the ease of shopping digitally and the convenience of picking up purchases on the customers, terms. Best Buy, is another retailer that has seen the benefits of offering this type of service with more than 40% of its online orders picked up in-store.
5. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Target’s investments in eCommerce paid off with two million people using Target’s curbside pickup option for the first time during the first quarter of 2020.
Provide standalone pickup locations
6. Amazon has more than 30 pick-up locations across the US where customers can pickup Amazon purchases. This service is similar to the service provided by the post office but instead it is dedicated to Amazon and customers can return packages at these locations free of charge. Prime members can even receive same day or one day pick-up at these locations.
Offer fast delivery
7. Its not surprising that consumers want things delivered quickly. Amazon pioneered fast delivery but many retailers are racing to catch up. Home Depot is trying to make online ordering as convenient as possible, targeting 2022 as the year when it will be able to provide same day or next day delivery throughout the United States.
8. Customers shopping at Hema, a grocery chain owned by Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba, can have groceries delivered in 30 minutes for free, if the delivery address is within three kilometers of a Hema store. This applies to customers that shop in store and want their orders delivered to their homes or if they made the purchase online. This service is even faster than Amazon’s. Amazon’s fastest delivery service window is same day within two hours.
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Make returns easier
9. Returning items creates a lot of friction in the online shopping process but retailers are trying to make the process as hassle free as possible. Nordstrom Local, Nordstrom's smaller store format started accepting returns of online orders from competitors such as Kohl’s and Macy’s last September. This is a way to think more holistically about your customers’ needs and any additional trips to Nordstrom from customers who use this service can lead to additional purchases.
Offer a “try before you buy” program
10. Many direct to consumer retailers offer what is known as “try before you buy” programs where customers are sent merchandise without having to pay for it upfront. Customers shopping with ThirdLove, an online bra and underwear retailer, start the try before you buy shopping process by taking a bra fit finder quiz. The quiz provides a bra recommendation in as little as 60 seconds. Based on the fit finder, customers can choose to have the recommended bra sent to them. Customers pay a shipping free and once they receive the bra, ThirdLove says customers should: “Wear it. Wash it. Live in the bra for 30 days”. If a customer decides to keep the bra they are charged $68.00 and if not returns and exchanges are free.
Speaking about the launch of the program, ThirdLove Co-Founder Heidi Zak said: "we had an amazing product, but how would we get women to actually take that chance and try the first bra?. 75% of customers who tried the try before you buy program ended up becoming ThirdLove customers. Zak has also said: "[The program] allowed a woman to take a risk on a brand she hadn't heard of and that truly changed the course of our business. It made us profitable.”
11. Direct to consumer brand M.M.LaFleur also said that its try before you buy program was the one initiative that was central to turning the fortunes of the company around in the early days of the company. Founder Sarah LaFleur says that after the service launched they went from being unable to pay for rent to tripling their revenue.
12. Warby Parker offers a program where customers can select five frames and have those frames sent to the customer’s home free of charge. An online quiz can also be taken to help customers select which frames they are interested in. Customers have five days to try on their frames and decide which one(s) they like. At the end of the five days customers can send the frames back to Warby Parker using a free return label.
Open brick and mortar popup shops
13. Popups and bricks and mortar stores should be a part of any direct to consumer retailer’s arsenal, just look at Warby Parker or Glossier. Popups add much needed excitement, discovery and novelty. Direct to consumer retailer Glossier hosted a popup in 2018 at a café in San Francisco where customers could eat fried chicken while shopping for Glossier’s beauty products. Creating an event like this that coincides with introducing new products or featuring products you already have in a new way can drive excitement and engagement. Customer purchases of beauty products came in unique packaging to make the visit feel even more special.
14. Amazon’s first foray into physical retail in the UK involved a popup store in central London featuring Amazon fashion. The weeklong popup, was the first of its kind in London for Amazon. Each day the popup which focused on men’s and women’s apparel and had a different theme. The first two days focused on autumn and winter fashion trends, the next two days focused on fitness and the remaining days focused on street and party wear. The popup also featured stylists to help customers find the perfect look. Speaking about the event a spokesperson for Amazon said: “this is a big learning experience for us to understand how Amazon fashion translates in physical retail.”
Offer a personalized online shopping experience
15. Starbucks’ popular mobile app provides customers with personalized recommendations for additional products they may want to purchase based on their purchase history. Starbucks' Chief Technology Officer says the company uses “a data-driven AI algorithm based on your own preferences, your own behavior as well as behaviors that [Starbucks is] trying to drive”. Starbucks has said that its personalization initiative “is the single biggest driver” of improved spend per customer it has seen.
16. In 2018 Walmart relaunched its website with a new design and personalized content in to drive growth of eCommerce sales. Shoppers now see trending items from their area when they are on the site’s home page. For example, mattresses has made the list of trending items in Dallas and so did Chicago Cubs tumblers in Illinois.
17. Other retailers have seen success with personalized online shopping pages. After implementing region specific checkout pages L'Occitane saw a 15% increase in mobile sales. It also generated a 10% increase in sales after it showed customers locally trending items and sales.
Speaking about the personalization initiative Marc Lore, Walmart’s CEO of U.S. eCommerce said: “It just really kind of brings that [regional] flavor to life.” “You want the site to make shopping faster and easier, and when you’re showing those items that customers are trending towards, you’re actually making a faster shopping journey for them, which is ultimately the goal.”
Allow other retailers to sell on your website
18. Walmart is also making a concerted effort to drive more traffic to its website by adding more third-party sellers. Since Walmart’s marketplace is not as crowded as Amazon’s individual sellers have a better chance at getting noticed. Between 2016 and 2017 Walmart went from having 10 million items on its website to having 50 million.
Walmart also added a Lord & Taylor store on its website in 2018. Walmart calls this a “premium destination” for shoppers. This is good move for Lord & Taylor which only had 2.2 million unique visitors in April of 2018 a much smaller amount than the 101 million visitors on walmart.com.
Offer an integrated mobile and in-store shopping experience
19. Nike has 29 stores in the United States, 57 in other parts of the world as well as a number of outlet stores. Michael Martin, Nike’s global head of digital products has said: “we want to have the best store experience where our most connected customers are, whereas another company might look at the inverse — if people are shopping in the app, they don’t need a store there. But we see our approach as better serving our customers.”
Martin also said: “the way we look at digital and in-store is not channel-by-channel, or one channel helping the other. Instead, we architected the entire notion of why someone with a phone in their pocket would walk into a store.” “Martin has also commented that viewing the store and Nike’s mobile app as connected customer touchpoints has increased Nike’s sales.
Try social commerce
20. You may have heard about Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba but what about Pinduoduo? Founded four years ago by an ex-Google engineer, Colin Huang, Pinduoduo is a Chinese eCommerce company that sells a wide range of products including household toiletries, groceries, apparel and electronics. So what makes Pinduoduo so special? For one it has cracked social commerce. The growth of the platform is largely due to recommendations from friends to take part in group purchases which then drive down the price of items for sale.
When shopping on Pinduoduo merchandise features two prices, one price for the item if it is purchased individually and another price if it is bought as part of a group. To enact group buying all a customer has to do is share a link with the item they want to buy with family and friends via WeChat, China’s largest social network. Once enough people have decided to join in customers can get a “team discount” that provides a discount of as much as 90% off. This strategy has been particularly effective in attracting new customers to Pinduoduo who have discovered the site via friends and family.
Pinduodou has grown very quickly. In only two years after launch in 2015 it generated more than $14.7 billion in gross merchandise volume. In contrast it took Taobao (Alibaba) five years to achieve that milestone and JD.com ten years.
Offer subscription services
21. Subscription services are a great way to secure a reoccurring revenue bundle. Many retailers have jumped into this area include Nike. Last year Nike launched “Nike Adventure Club” a subscription model that allows parents to order shoes for their children aged 2-10 on a monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly basis. These subscriptions cost $50/month, $30/month, or $20/month, respectively. Each of those subscriptions gives subscribers a new pair of Nike sneakers that cost about $50 or more once a month, once every two months or once every three months. This is a way of ensuring that customers spend with Nike starting at a very young age. It is also a way for Nike to cement a reoccurring revenue stream similar to what Amazon has done with Amazon Prime but on a lower scale.
Offer augmented reality shopping
22. In 2017 Home Depot expanded the functionality in its main mobile app to allow users to overlay Home Depot merchandise on any room in their home. Home Depot’s app ascertains the dimensions of a select number of Home Depot items ranging from refrigerators to chandeliers. That enables the consumer to have a 3D visual of a product in any space they want to see a product in. This app is worth a try as Forrester Research recently ranked Home Depot’s mobile app as the number one retailer mobile app due to its functionality and user experience.